ART-PRESENTATION: Alighiero Boetti

Although not formally trained in art, Alighiero Boetti was preoccupied with the theory of creativity from an early age. Unlike other Arte Povera artists, he traveled to Afghanistan at the beginning of the ‘70s, he was introduced to the traditional craft of embroidery, which marked a turning point in the artist’s career. His fundamental concern with the relationship between “order” and “disorder” is manifest in his grid structures, derived from the “magical squares”, that feature sayings and aphorisms that stem from cultural, philosophical, mathematical and linguistic contexts.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Tornabuoni Gallery Art Archive

The exhibition of works by Alighiero Boetti, at the new space of the Galerie Tornabuoni Art in Paris takes the form of a retrospective. Encompassing his entire career, this show illustrates Boetti’s influence and the significance of his work within contemporary art, featuring work spanning from his early ink drawings, to works related to the Arte Povera Movement, the “Bollini”, “Lavori Postali”, “Aerei” and “Biro” series, important works on paper and the artist’s iconic embroideries. The highlights  and the core of the exhibition are, “Anno 1984” (1984), “Mappa” (1989-94)  and “Tutto” (1992- 94) that represent a crucial phase of Boetti’s artistic career. The first belongs to the “Copertine” series, works in which Boetti and his assistants traced magazine covers in pencil, thereby reversing the process of mechanical reproduction and slowing down the speed of communication, drawing the viewer in for a closer analysis with the fading lines of graphite rather than the immediate attention grabbing colour covers on a newsstand. “Anno 1984” is therefore a work about time as duration as well as a measurement, with the 12 panels composing the work acting as a calendar and a permanent record of topical events.“Mappa” (1989-94)  is the only one to have been embroidered by seven families of Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan, it is the last of Boetti’s works, completed just two months before the artist’s death. To signify it preciousness and uniqueness, Boetti hid a single bead in the weave: “È una perla”. “Tutto”  (1992-94) is from Boetti’s final series of works, it is a collection of shapes traced from magazines, books and newspapers by Boetti and his assistants, before being coloured in according to their preference by the Afghan embroiderers. “I am a creator of rules. And then thanks to these rules, these games, these mechanisms, I can play or make others play” said Boetti in an interview in 1984. In this case the rules were simply that no two colours should touch, and no single colour should dominate the canvas. Together these three works illustrate the central themes of the artist’s practice, from notions of authorship and representation, to games, time and language, but also concepts that today are more relevant than ever: globalism, multi-culturalism, media image versus reality and communication.

Info: Galerie Tornabuoni Art, Passage de Retz, 9 Rue Charlot, Paris, Duration: 3/2-8/4/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30-18:30, www.tornabuoniart.fr