Alighiero Boetti

Acquired directly from the artist's family by the present owner

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Alighiero e Boetti, 2001, p. 46, illustrated in colour
London, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Alighiero Boetti, un Pozzo senza Fine, Embroideries, 2006, p. 61, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is softer and lighter in the original, with the red in the border tending more towards brick red. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are few irregular and loose fabric strands. Some light dirt has gathered to the surface in few places, in particular to the white fringes at the extremities of the work.
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This work is registered in the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome, under number 2253 and is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity

Alternando da Uno a Cento e Viceversa is one of the fifty kilims produced in 1993 by Alighiero Boetti for his solo show at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Grenoble. The design of each kilim is based on a pattern called Alternando da Uno a Cento e Viceversa (Alternating One to One Hundred and Vice Versa), which the artist had previously used in a number of works on paper. The procedure is based on the alternation of one hundred black and white squares inside a grid of one hundred larger squares. In the first square of the grid, the first small square is left white, and the other ninety-nine are black; in the second square of the grid there are two black and ninety-eight white squares, and so on; the last square, always a monochrome, is either black or white, depending on which colour started off the process.

 

The design of the kilims was produced by students from twenty-nine different art colleges in France, then passed on to Afghan craftswomen working in Pakistan. "The kilim is the simplest, humblest, and lightest of carpets. Woven and napless, it arises solely from the accord of warp and woof. Unlike knotted carpets, its decoration does not allow curves and hence naturalistic motives: it permits only horizontal and vertical values - the ones that are able to follow the rule established  by the practical necessities of the weft - and so it accepts only the bare skeleton, the essential, of the idea.... The kilims, consistent with the overall development of Boetti's oeuvre and almost as a summary of it, appear as a reflection on man in his universal terms, expressed through the intervention of a thousand different subjectives and ethnic groups... The individual is diluted as he is dispersed, his time and place of origin are dissolved, and only the common framework remains." (Angela Vettese, Alighiero e Boetti, Grenoble 1993)