Alighiero Boetti

Sale: Sotheby's, Milan, Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, 23 November 2004, Lot 333

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few tiny thread pulls in isolated places and light handling marks to the top left corner.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The present work is a magnificent exposition of Alighiero Boetti’s deep seated philosophical beliefs, and a worthy example of one of his best known series – the arazzi. Across 625 squares of multitudinous colour, Boetti deftly engages with constructs of language, mathematics, and the polarity between order and disorder to create a work of mesmerising invention. Completed only six years before the artist’s death, it exists as testament to the extraordinary level of poetic expression that Boetti attained in maturity.

Boetti believed that the world was characterised by the forces of ordine e disordine – order and disorder; that in order to understand the chaos of the natural world, humanity was forced to schematise and codify it into an organised mode of comprehension. Allied to this belief, and indeed not entirely separate from it, was his dedication to the notion of twinning or dualism – the idea that every force has a yin-and-yang-like equal and opposite force, and that they act not to subsume each other but rather to exist in harmonious equilibrium. It was because of these beliefs that he designed the arazzi in Rome but had them woven in the Middle East, either in Afghanistan or, as with the present work, in Peshawar, Pakistan. In this way, their split execution was fundamentally based on dualism and twinning and entirely imbued with ordine e disordine.

Indeed this philosophical background bleeds into every aspect of the present work. At first glance it appears completely chaotic; a blur of different colours, organised into a grid but otherwise deployed almost at random. However, prolonged examination reveals a rigorously ordered scheme of words and phrases arranged in exact geometric patterns. It is typical of Boetti’s subversive style that a work which appears at first so wild and random can be reduced into a system of constituent parts where each square of the grid relates to a word which pertains to a phrase which plays its spatial geometric role in the wider order of the composition.

The central block of 9x9 squares is taken by the title of the work: Oggi il quarto giorno dell’ottavo mese dell’anno millenovecentoottantotto accanto al Pantheon (Today, the fourth day of the eighth month of the year nineteen eighty-eight next to the Pantheon). Elsewhere, in each of the four corners, are blocks of four squares by four, featuring phrases that pertain to the philosophical background or creation of the work. In the upper corners we see Regola e Regolarsi (Rule and regulate) and Ordine e Disordine, while in the lower corners we see Peshawar Pakistan and Centri di Pensiero (Centres of thought). Apart from two signatures, the rest of the panel is dedicated to similar squares, populated by similar words and phrases, remarkable not only in many cases for their complexity and relevance, but also for the fact that each is exactly sixteen characters. In this way, we understand that the skill and genius of Boetti’s artistry is equally demonstrated in the linguistic manipulation of 32 phrases, each of identical length, as in the final aesthetic appearance of the work.

We can also ascribe mathematical import to the composition of this work. The grid structure itself, measuring 25 by 25 squares, surely references the Pythagorean Magic Square. Boetti revered Pythagoras for the way that he used rigorous theorems to schematise and comprehend everything from trigonometry to musical harmony – in other words, the way he imposed human order on the disorder of the natural world in order to better comprehend it.

This work completely emblematises Alighiero Boetti’s unique philosophical outlook: what at first seems an unjumbled disordered chaos is, after careful consideration, revealed to be an ingeniously designed scheme of accurate invention. Its conceptual focal point is a single ‘O’ within the central block of 9 by 9 squares; what should be accanto becomes ‘acconto’ in what is presumably a mistake on the part of the Pakistani weavers – a single moment of untrammelled disordine rearing its head within the ordine of Boetti’s original plan and the ultimate vindication of his beliefs.