Sacking and Red, 1954, by Alberto Burri: 'The red radiates heat across the gallery while the sacking draws you close.' Photograph: Tate, London © Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, 2012  The beautiful show of paintings by Alberto Burri that has just opened at the Estorick Collection is about 40 years late, though in his case better late than never. Britain seems to be the only country in Europe that has failed to appreciate (or even to collect) this charismatic Italian pioneer. Even in America, where it is unusual to find a bold voice on who came first, Burri has been hailed as a model for the abstract expressionists and an inspiration to Robert Rauschenberg. But mighty Tate Modern, for instance, has only a solitary example of his work.  It is in this exhibition: a fiercely lyrical vision made out of rags of rough sacking stitched to each other as well as the canvas. Among these ochre tatters and patches are occasional holes that reveal a blackness below, like the darkness beneath the riffled surface of a wheat field. And blazing above this horizontal landscape, it seems, is a red harvest sky. Such perfect metaphors all condensed in one: the patchwork of fields, the crop sewn directly into the ground, the conjuring of grain out of grain sacks.  Quite why the eye should read the painting – if it can be called a painting – this way is anyone's guess. For there are other viewers who see it as the evocation of a reclining nude, or the close-up of a bleeding body; and still others who regard it as strictly abstract. But Sacking and Red, as it is called, has an intense presence that has something to do with the red paint, and something to do with the sacking, but above all comes from the curious combination. The red radiates heat across the gallery while the sacking draws you close: it's an appeal to sight, scent and touch.  Alberto Burri (1915-95) was an avid footballer who played for the Umbrian first division, a qualified doctor who worked for the Italian army during the second world war and for the final 18 months was interned in Texas. His first picture, made with canvas and paints supplied by the YMCA, was a view of the desert he could see from the prison camp.  Although the earliest works in this show are figurative – a melancholy bookseller, a melancholy fish out of water – Burri, along with many Italian artists of his generation who reacted against the politicised realism of the 40s, soon turned to abstraction. Tiny tempera landscapes of his native Italy conflate hints of Miró and Klee, though with strong local overtones that keep coming through even in the vast, two- and three-metre abstracts of the later years in which the raw earth seems to rake and mound in the claggy painted surface.  Sometimes it isn't paint at all, in fact, so much as resin, zinc oxide or thick black tar. Burri worked with ground pumice and kaolin, tutu netting and PVC glue, literally with sackcloth and ashes. The Estorick has works from all periods – the celebrated Sacks; the Hunchback series, humped canvases that broke with the traditional two-dimensional plane; the Combustione in which the materials were charred or torched. He could achieve marvels with rusty steel, plastic and insulation Celotex, and yet somehow it is never the medium that strikes before all else.  Again that seems to involve a kind of double take. Burri's paintings are concerned with carapace, with creating and breaking the surfaces of a plane, so they inevitably seem related to their counterparts in the world. Craters and rubble, tilled soil and skin, scorched earth, even the bubbles trapped in the frozen surface of a lake: they are invoked, if not recalled.  Two stretches of sackcloth, stitched at horizon level, with a black hole above and a dark oil stain below, and immediately you have a winter moon reflected in a pond. A fragment of clay, pale and cracked in its miniature frame, stands for both a little piece of ground and a whole jagged landmass. It is almost impossible to get away from these cognitive associations.  Burri was against image, interpretation, more or less everything except the rectilinear shape of a picture. "I see beauty and that is all," was his defensive comment. Yet the reverse may have seemed true to his first audiences, for whom his materials were about as unbeautiful as his methods, all of which appeared to involve violence.  The works buckle, rip and blister. Charred paper dapples the canvas with black snowflakes; metal swells in undulating relief. There is a powerful sense of concentrated energy. Yet no matter how Burri attacks his materials, scissors or blowtorch in hand, the aftermath is always and essentially beautiful.  It is easy to associate the lacerations with war wounds, the stitches with sutures, and perhaps they were somewhere in Burri's subconscious. But seeing 40 of his works together, it feels more as if this was in his expertise. He lays a filament of net and some molten plastic over a skin of crimson acrylic and a microcosm of flaming worlds appears. He scalpels sheets of Celotex into perfect rectangles and arcs, puzzled neatly together like early minimalism, and the eye is charmed. Condensed into two inches, balanced across two metres, Burri is a master of scale.  His art, so elegant and beautiful to modern eyes, was dramatically subversive in its day. It is worth remembering this at the Estorick Collection. Like Lucio Fontana, his better-known contemporary, Burri was there before arte povera with its humble materials; before Yves Klein with his fire paintings; before Gustav Metzger with his scorched plastic and acid. If he seems more poet than protester, never entirely abandoning canvas, paint and frame, Burri is nonetheless reaching beyond painting's conventional limits to give it a brave new repertoire.
The great postwar pioneer Alberto Burri blazes a trail of sackcloth and ashes in this long overdue UK retrospective, writes Laura Cumming