Alighiero Boetti

John Weber Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1996

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the whites are slightly brighter in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully capture the embroidery and woven effect of the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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"Tutto emerges from a vision of the world in which everything meets.  It also presents a notion of 'fullness', understood as the ability to encompass everything, as the desire to dissolve one's own self (Perdita d'identita) in the indistinct flow of life and its countless fragments."  Antonella Soldaini in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Alighiero e Boetti, 1999, p. 23

Executed in the last fifteen years of Alighero Boetti's life, the Tutto series is the apogee of the artist's unremitting, career-long quest to hone a means of artistic expression capable of representing the universal whole and all its creation.  Belonging to an important and rare series of embroidery works, the Tutto of the title denotes every form, every culture and every concept, literally translating to "everything".  Working from multifarious sources of visual stimuli – foreign newspapers, children's books, advertising hoardings – Boetti sought to appropriate a myriad of forms and figures and arrange them without prejudice or hierarchy in an unfamiliar, abstract landscape. As an organising principle each form is created in the contour of the preceding image, so that every outline contains and echoes the next form. As a result, the overall composition is not determined by the controlling hand of the artist but derives entirely from the forms themselves.

The Tutto series derived from an earlier work, Pack of 1969, that was conceived as a circular block of cement displaying irregular cracks across its surface, a result of the drying process.  The unique character of each of these cracks was expressed upon individual examination, although when observed entirely, they were overwhelmed by the intricate outline of the whole. As Anne-Marie Sauzeau noted, for Boetti this discovery within Pack was "the primordial and unitarian representation of the world, a compact mass similar to the Danish coast's ice slabs, more or less joined together. A kind of disconnected puzzle that is adrift, that gradually differentiates and proliferates like a cellular division, or in the same way continents drift" (cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Turin, Alighiero Boetti 1965-1994, 1996-97, p. 41).  The nature of Pack, in which the necessarily abstract shapes represented an almost elemental glimpse of an undetermined universe, informed much of Boetti's work, including Tutto.  In these works, objects from everyday life find themselves scattered in a seemingly random fashion, and when viewed from a distance, the effect is of a wildly rhythmic phantasmagoria of various shapes and colours. However, on closer inspection, forms often reveal themselves as individual objects from everyday experience such as floating guitars and figures.  It was Boetti's intent that the composition of Tutto was to be completely democratic, non-exclusionary and disordered; the only rule being that each image outline leads into another. The orientation of the work too, is entirely free, and this is all part of the artist's concept.  

Fascinated by non-Western cultures, Boetti spent long periods in Afghanistan where he commissioned the women of Kabul to weave his tapestries, thereby investing his works with different traditions, ideas and associations. Relinquishing the selection of colours to the hand and eye of a different culture, Boetti delighted in the abstraction, loss of identity and homogenisation of forms that resulted from the varying degrees of colour fusion. While individual forms are decipherable – a standing figure, characters from the Farsi alphabet, a flying bird – the resulting image transcends the physical world in which it is anchored to encompass the incorporeal and intangible, the universal whole that Boetti sought to embrace.  Boetti explains the creative process: "I asked my assistants to draw everything, every possible shape, abstract or figurative, and to amalgamate them until the paper sheet was saturated. Then I took the drawing to Afghanistan to get it embroidered with 90 kinds of different coloured threads, provided that there was an equal quantity of each of them. The different colour of each shape is chosen by the women.  In order to avoid establishing any hierarchy among them, I use them all. Actually, my concern is to avoid to make choices according to my taste and to invent systems that will then choose on my behalf" (the artist cited in Adachiara Zevi, 'Alighiero e Boetti: Scrivere, Ricamare, Disegnare', Corriere della Sera, 1992).  This sense of ordered randomness reflected Boetti's interest in Sufism, a mystical tradition in Islam, which captivated the artist. Boetti spent a great deal of time conversing with Sufi scholars, including the poet Berang Ramazan, who the artist held in the highest esteem. A tenet of Sufism is the belief that the essence of truth is devoid of all form, yet inseparable from all forms, material and spiritual. This is evident in Tutto where an apparent abstraction is constructed of individual figurative parts.

Boetti's Tuttos are held in treasured collections around the world, including the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt.  In Boetti's other works, such as Maps of the World, or The Longest River in the World, the representation of reality is linked to a precise historical moment or geographical location. Tutto, however, represents the universal and the ubiquitous, an omniscient expression of continuous conception.  Conceived toward the end of his life, we can consider this work a reflection of the world, and a unique visual representation of pure artistic creation.