ON FIRE - Inspiring works from some (male) artists playing with fire

Lately, I’ve been returning again and again to an exhibition I saw in Venice during the Biennale 2022: On Fire. It’s a beautifully curated volume exploring how contemporary artists have approached fire as a medium: as destruction, as transformation, as spectacle, as ritual. I find myself browsing through its pages like someone retracing a path they didn’t know they were following, observing how others before me have burnt, marked, charred, and scarred surfaces in search of meaning, presence, erasure, transcendence.

This book is a source of great inspiration. Every page sparks new ideas, new associations, a new possibilities. At the same time, it also raises questions and concern about some burning matters (couldn't resist the pun). As I read through the names and study the works, I feel a growing sense of discomfort. Once again, every artist featured is a man. Every single one. Even in spaces that explore the primal, the mystical, the elemental, the feminine is still absent, or most likely erased.

Is fire necessarily masculine? Has it simply been made masculine, through centuries of myth, language, domination? Is it because fire is seen as violent, assertive, dangerous, traits long coded as male? But fire is also warmth. It’s domestic, cyclical, sacred. It cooks, it heals, it dances, it seduces and fades. It bleeds light. What would a feminine fire look like? How would it burn? How would it create?

These will be questions to keep in mind as I develop my experimental practice.

The men and fire:

About the Book:

On Fire is the title of the first exhibition entirely dedicated to the use of fire as a means of artistic creation among the post-war avant-garde movements. The exhibition, curated by Bruno Corà and promoted by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Tornabuoni Art, brings together some of the most iconic works either made with fire, or that include the presence of flames.

The exhibition is developed through six sections. These offer the opportunity to discover together for the first time the following artists and their relation with fire: Yves Klein, Alberto Burri, Arman, Jannis Kounellis, Pier Paolo Calzolari and Claudio Parmiggiani.

Naturally fugacious, fire has no shape, weight, or density. It has always been a source of fascination for artists, both for its potential effects on other materials and for its potential active presence in works of art. The post-war avant-garde movements experimented with fire on various materials, thereby exploiting its destructive as well as its generative effects.Thus, in the work of these great artists, fire became not only the sensitive protagonist, but also a medium of innovation within their pictorial and visual language.

Although the artists shared the use of fire, the exhibition focuses on each master, highlighting the different ways in which they employed this element. Fire can be found as an instrument of combustion (Klein, Burri, Arman); as a living presence with its own sensory and sometimes spectacular effects, such as light, heat, and even noise (Klein, Kounellis, Calzolari); and lastly, as a pictorial trace using the smoke obtained through combustion (Calzolari, Parmiggiani).

On Fire gathers 28 works, including several previously unseen or rarely shown masterpieces, thanks to the collaboration with the artists’ foundations and important international private loans. Through these works, the exhibition documents one of the most radical, and at the same time unexplored, revolutions in the visual language of contemporary art.

Introduction by Bruno Corà:

I found particularly resonating and relevant to my own practice, the works and thoughts of Alberto Burri and Yves Klein:

Alberto Burri mainly uses plastic materials for these paintings. For him, the use of fire is like a tangible participation in a mnemonic outburst of primitive paleo-shamanic tension.

Burri's introduction of fire into his paintings appears closely linked to his tendency to experiment with the possibilities and qualities of materials. It is a disruptive element, somthing surprising and unpredictable to be dominated, capable of exciting in the artist the challange of chance, of controlling and guiding it through his sensitivity to the balance of the form.

Photography too has contributed to the enjoyment of these works. The act of burning is destructive, and the ash is the trace of the destruction worked by Burri on the plastic material but, at the same time, it is the creation of a new image, a vital work, in that its forms announces a new order of space and balance of the signs obtained through it. The black and white pictures by Ugo Mulas (now universally recognised as one of the greatest Italian photographers of the past century) reveal a pondered distance that was adopted to obtain a certain artist-artwork effect, and to allow us to glimpse Burri's figure and movements through the opaque screen of plastic material. What is striking is the desolation of the black strips of plastic, burnt with a torch, dangling from the large holes made by the artist, so that the manual workmanship takes on a primary significance in the viewer's imagination.

Yves Klein blazed a trail through the firmament of the 20th century art that was like the luminous wake of a meteorite and, analogously, as bright as it was transient. The crescendo of qualifying acts that marked his artistic career could almost lead us to believe that he had a species of premonition about how little time he had at his dispodal to do all this work. Although at first sight his work appears to be hermetic, esoteric and enigmatic, when looked at more closely it turns out to be extremely accessible. Klein's work and his path are based on just a few essential principles, the significance of which should not be misunderstood since they are, largely, anthropologically shared, elementary and universal. In relation to his "peintures de feu" (Paintings of Fire) and "mur de feu" (Wall of Fire), during a conference about the evolution of art towards the Immaterial, the artist said: "In my evolution I had to arrive at an architecture of the air because only there can I finally produce and stabilise pictorial sensibility in the raw material state. Until then, in the still highly-defined architectural space, I paint monochrome paintings in the most illuminated way possible, the sensibility of the still very tangible colour has to be reduced to a more pneumatic intangible sensibility. Using air, gas and sound as architectural elements, this development can advance further. My walls of fire, my walls of water, have roofs of air, they are materials for constructing a new architecture. With these three classical elements - fire, air and water - the city of tomorrow will be built, and finally it will be flexible, spiritual and intangible."

NOTE: Read "Cinders" by Jacques Darrida.

"The fire: what one cannot extinguish in this trace among others is that is a cinder. Memory or oblivion, as you wish, but of the fire, trait that still relates to the burning. No doubt the fire has withdrawn, the conflagration has been subdued, but if cinder there is, it is because the fire remains in retreat. By its retreat it still feigns having abandoned the terrain. It still camouflages, it disguises itself beneath the multiplicity, the dust, the makeup powder, the insistent 'pharmakon' of a plural body that no longer belongs to itself - not to remain nearby itself, not to belong to itself, there is an essence of the cinder, its cinder itself"

"Our entire world is the cinder of innumerable living beings; and what is living is so little in relation to the whole, it must be that, once already, everything was transformed into life and it will continue to be so"

On the website, there were also some really interesting videos about the 6 artists and their processes:

• Alberto Burri

• Yves Klein

• Arman

• Jannis Kounellis

• Claudio Parmiggiani

• Pier Paolo Calzolari