Alighiero Boetti

This work is registered at the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome under number 66/0/2 and is accompanied by a photocertificate

One could say that art and camouflage are twins, or, in the words of Hugh B. Cott: "The one makes something unreal recognisable: the other makes something real unrecognisable."

The inherent duality of camouflage lends itself compellingly to Alighiero e Boetti’s investigation into the potential of everyday, manmade materials to undermine orthodox notions of art. Striving to blur the conventional boundaries separating art and life, Boetti was particularly fascinated by notions of culture and identity, concept and material. Made from a roll of camouflage fabric introduced by the Italian army in 1929 which Boetti found in a Turin flea market, Mimetico bears witness to the encompassing universality of the artist’s vision. Seeking to propagate his art as widely as possible using the humblest of gestures and means, Boetti worked according to a philosophical approach based on principles of duality, rejecting the strategies and materials of 'high' art in favour of 'low' art forms such as craft and design.

The gradated tones and colours spread evenly across the entire cloth endow Mimetico with an all-over quality similar to the American Action paintings of Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky that Boetti so admired. However, as a readymade, Mimetico counters their retinal quality and is invested with the intellectual concerns characteristic of Conceptual art. Executed in 1966 shortly after Boetti’s move to Turin, the Mimetico series was included in the artist’s first solo exhibition there where it caught the eye of the famous art critic Germano Celant who would eventually coin the term Arte Povera.