Alighiero Boetti

Grenoble, Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Alighiero e Boetti au Magasin, 1993-1994, illustrated
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Alighiero Boetti, 2002, illustrated in colour 

For his solo exhibition at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble in 1993, Alighiero Boetti produced fifty kilims based on a pattern called Alternando da uno a centro e viceversa (Alternating one to one hundred and vice versa). Each of the kilims was created by a process that involved the subdivision of a square into an imposed grid of a hundred squares, each of which were composed of one hundred smaller squares. To this basic network Boetti applied a formula wherein the first square of the grid there was one black square and 99 white.. In the second square there would be two white squares and 98 black squares, while in the third square there would be three black and 97 white parts, and so on. By the last square of the grid at the corner diagonally opposite where the pattern had started, there was always a monochrome square, either black or white depending on which colour had started off the process.

Boetti created the concept and delegated the design of each kilim to art students from twenty-nine colleges around France. This was done to ensure the greatest diversity possible was achieved as Angela Vettese has explained. "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 subjective 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)