Alighiero Boetti

I always find myself talking about the notion of double, which […] is present in all my work. The truth is that it is a natural reality: it is incontrovertible that a cell splits in two, then in four and so on; that we have two legs, two arms and two eyes and so on; that mirrors double images; that Man has based his existence on a series of binary models, including computers; that the speech is based on couples of opposed terms […]. It is evident then that the notion of couple is one of the fundamental archetypes of our culture […]. (A. Boetti, 1988)

Boetti was born in Turin on December 16, 1940. In his teenage years he was intrigued by exoticism, of which he had a glimpse in Paul Klee’s Moroccan watercolours, and grew interested in the deeds of his ancestor Giovan Battista Boetti (1743-94), a Dominican missionary in Mossul, the ancient city of Mesopotamia (today Iraq) who later converted to Persian esotericism and to Sufism. After leaving the Faculty of Economics, Boetti developed a passion for art: the recent informal and tachiste tradition (1960-62), the American Expressionism, Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism (1961), Henri Michaux’s mescaline-engendered drawings (1962) and Giacomo Balla’s futurist reconstruction of the universe (1963). Between 1963 and 1964 he spent a long time in Paris, where he studied etching and discovered Nicolas de Staël’s lyrical Abstractionism, Jean Dubuffet’s dramatic Matterism, the universal art of André Malraux’s Imaginary Museum. He read sinologist Marcel Granet’s works and became concerned with Gaston Bachelars’s research on poetic imagination. Back in Turin, he executed 3D works based on tautology, using industrial materials or everyday objects (Sedia e Scala; Zig-zag, Mancorrente. Catasta, 1966, Contemporary Art Museum, Castello di Rivoli, Turin), which were on view at his first solo show at the Christian Stein Gallery of Turin in 1967.  Due to his research on the value of materials independently of their symbolic or cultural meaning and the close connection in his works between objects and images, critic Germano Celant included him in the Arte Povera movement. Hence his participation to exhibitions such as Arte povera -IM spazio at the La Bertesca gallery of Genoa (1967) and Arte Povera + Azioni Povere in the premises of the Antichi Arsenali della Repubblica di Amalfi (1968). Later he felt the need to abandon this research and focus on ideas, grew concerned with the aesthetic and communicative potentials of mail and with developing a new personal identity, which was first materialized in the double portrait Gemelli (1968). This trend to reduce the size of the works is testified by his participation to the exhibitions Live in your Head. When Attitudes become Forms (1969), Processi di pensiero visualizzati and Vitalità del negativo (1970). In 1969 he returned to the two-dimensionality of paper with Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione and with the Lavori postali series, based on the scanning of time and on the laws of mathematical permutation. Inspired by Albert Hochheimer’s Novel of Big Rivers (published in Italy in 1956), in the years from 1970 to 1974 he completed a demanding documentation work aimed at revealing the deceptive precariousness of all scientific and rationalistic knowledge of the world. The documentation was collected in the book Classifying, the thousand longest rivers in the world (1977), and inspired the creation of the homonymous series of embroideries on fabric and the relating projects (1976-82, The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Looking for new stimuli, in 1971 he discovered Afghanistan where he went back for long stays at least twice a year until 1979. He opened a hotel in Kabul, the One Hotel, and had local women weave multicoloured tapestries, thus inaugurating an artistic process based on the time lapse between the creative moment and the execution of the work, which is visible in the series of big embroidered Maps of the Earth’s sphere (1972-1992). At the same time, after reading Norman Oliver Brown’s essay Love's body [Random House, New York 1966; published in Italy with the title Corpo d’amore, Il Saggiatore, Milano 1969], the artist began a reflection on the biology of the human body, which started in 1970 with performances consisting in “writing with two hands” and was fully accomplished in 1975. In the meantime he moved to Rome, where in 1973 he met Francesco Clemente. At this point his research broadened and he decided that he would no longer take care of the practical part in the execution of his works. In the large ballpoint panels, in fact, he limited himself to inventing the code, turning writing into a cryptographic rebus. In 1974 he exhibited these works in New York at the group show Eight Contemporary Artists held at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1974 to 1976 he travelled to Guatemala, Ethiopia, Sudan. In 1975 he went back to New York. The subtle linguistic and formal play that consists in matching words that are similar but have an opposed meaning, such as Ordine e disordine (Order and Disorder) (1973) or the graphic alternation between letters and a background on a square grid, also characterized the “mathematical works” that Boetti executed between 1975 and 1977, fascinated by the laws governing the numerical progression and the acceleration potential possessed by multiplication. The project Da mille a mille of 1975 was related to this research and consisted in decorating the internal wall of the enclosure porch in the school of the Dar Al Hanan Institution of Gedda (never accomplished). In 1978 he held an anthological exhibition curated by Jean Christophe Ammann at the Kunsthalle of Basel, that featured historical works alongside more recent ones: Aerei (1977), characterized by a faithful reproduction of airplanes developed in collaboration with illustrator Guido Fuga (1977), and works inspired by news items and political and cultural issues disclosed by newspapers (Gary Gilmore, 1977, Fondazione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia). The interest for the media brought him to collaborate with the daily newspaper “Il Manifesto”, published in Rome, for which, everyday for a year, he executed a drawing, thus accomplishing his idea of a serial work for the general public. In 1983 he created the series of pencil drawings traced from the covers of popular magazines, which is a sort of ironic synthesis of the visual legacy of a year. The works of this decade are characterized by the presence of many letters and whole stories written using his left hand, and by a lively chromatism which culminated in the total saturation of the Tutto, executed in collaboration with Afghan embroiderers that had taken refuge in Peshawar, Pakistan, after the Soviet invasion. The same year he created the large wall mosaic in white ceramic for the external façade of the Art Gallery of the State University of Northridge, Los Angeles, for which he used cardboards with drawings made by the students following his indications. In 1985 in Tokyo he took an interest in the shodo: the Japanese calligraphy, collaborating with master Enomoto San. In 1989 he created the scenes and the costumes for Vita Accardi’s show Hanjo, drawn from the Modern Nô Plays by Yukio Mischima [pseudonym of Japanese writer and playwright Hiraoka Kimitake, a prominent author of the Kabuki theatre], staged in Rome at the Trastevere theatre that year. In 1990 he was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the XLIV Venice Biennial, where he exhibited large-format works on paper characterized by a continual flow of images, continuing the research started in the 1980s with the Tutto and the Extra-strong drawings. In addition to small-format works of which he also executed the practical part, he directed two monumental and choral works that were exhibited at his solo show at the Magasin of Grenoble in 1993: the 50 Kilims based on the topic Alternando da uno a cento e viceversa (Alternating from one to one hundred and vice versa) and Oeuvre postale, which is the largest postal work ever, executed in collaboration with the Museé de la Poste of Paris. In 1993 he completed a project that dated back to the late 1970s, Autoritratto, (Self-portrait), a statue derived from the bronze cast of his body, which was meant to be the symbol of the creative force of the artist. In the summer of that year he was diagnosed a tumour. He died in Rome on April 24, 1994.

Accanto al Pantheon
Alighiero Boetti
ITALY Milano - 1991
Prearo Editore

INDEX

photographs by R. Malkin

Bibliographical references

BOOKSHOP

Accanto al Pantheon
Alighiero Boetti
ITALY Milano - 1991
Prearo Editore

Alighiero e Boetti
Rolf Lauter
Andrea Marescalchi
ITALY Milano - 2004
Charta

INDEX

Bibliographical references

BOOKSHOP

Alighiero e Boetti
Rolf Lauter
Andrea Marescalchi
ITALY Milano - 2004
Charta

Alighiero e Boetti
Giovan Battista Salerno
Rinaldo Rossi
Andrea Marescalchi
ITALY Torino - 2006
Allemandi & C.

INDEX

Bibliographical references

Alighiero e Boetti
Giovan Battista Salerno
Rinaldo Rossi
Andrea Marescalchi
ITALY Torino - 2006
Allemandi & C.

Alighiero Boetti. Catalogo generale.
Jean-Christophe Ammann
ITALY - 2009
Electa

INDEX

Bibliographical references

BOOKSHOP

Alighiero Boetti. Catalogo generale.
Jean-Christophe Ammann
ITALY - 2009
Electa

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Alighiero & Boetti. Mettere all'arte il mondo
Achille Bonito Oliva
Electa - 2009

Pages 312
Price € 32.00