Alighiero Boetti

Mario Bertolini Collection, Italy

Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2007

Verzotti, 'Flash Art', Anno XVI, No. 114, June 1983, p. 49, illustrated

Jean-Christophe Amman, Alighiero Boetti Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 2012, p. 181, no. 681, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in several places and there are artist's pinholes in all four corners of each sheet. There is some minor creasing to some of the corner tips, and a very short nick towards the top left corner of the fourth sheet.
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“… It’s a fact that a word is transformed into a sign – this group of commas signify something.”

Alighiero Boetti in conversation with Bruno Corà, 1983, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (and travelling), Alghiero Boetti – Game Plan, 2011-12, p. 207.

The title of the present work, Udire tra le Parole – which translated means Hearing of the Words – is a perfect summation of the visual and sonic tautology of Alighiero Boetti’s idiosyncratic biro drawings. In these works, panels of monochrome rote repetition painstakingly executed with a ball-point pen, diagrammatically spell out phrases using commas positioned to sequentially correspond to letters of the alphabet. Through a constellation of symbols, in which commas appear like stars punctuating an undulating night sky, Boetti unpacks the significatory system inherent to our understanding of the written word. These works are at once chaotic and undeniably beautiful in their monochromatic variance as they are ordered and schematic in design. We spell the words out like a child playing a word game, tracing each sequential comma back to its corresponding letter, every word phonetically parsed within an individual expanse of hatched biro marks.

In Boetti's practice, systems of knowledge, sequences and classifications are subject to a process of ordering and disordering. As in the present work, the viewer’s own significatory cognition of written words is broken down and re-codified into a new convoluted structure that in turn re-affirms the meaning of the words themselves. Speaking of another work from the same corpus, Boetti explained: “There’s one work of mine, made with a biro, which is called Seguire il filo del discorso (Following the Thread of the Discourse), where participants follow the thread made by these commas. Following the thread of the discourse is tautological and then, based on the rule, there’s this structure that turns the word into a sign. It was necessary to visualise the comma as a fact of non-stability, of instability, and these little white dots were put on a certain background, that of the hatched biro, the ground made by a different hand” (Alighiero Boetti in conversation with Bruno Corà, 1983, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (and travelling), Alghiero Boetti – Game Plan, 2011-12, p. 207).

As alluded to above, a spurning of the artistic hand – in correlation with contemporary literary circles and Roland Barthe’s pronouncement of the death of the author – became of crucial importance following Boetti's dissociation from the objecthood of German Celant’s Arte Povera in 1969. Boetti increasingly began to farm the execution of these works out to hired hands: a painstaking and laborious task completed over the course of days, weeks and even months. Not only did this decision affirm the Boetti's staunch conceptualism as an artist, but it also introduced an element of unpredictability and chance.

The notion of the artist as a gambler, philosophical ‘Idler’, or Duchampian Dandy (Marcel Duchamp was incidentally his greatest influence, as redolent in Boetti’s playful use of language), is revealed both through a dislocation from the labour of production as well through the concept of time-wastage. Of the latter, Contest of Harmony and Invention from 1969 embodies the very root. By hand-tracing each square on a sheet of gridded paper and finding different methods of covering the printed lines, Boetti telescoped not only the passing of time – an engagement that threads throughout his practice – but also that of inefficiency and the possibility of art-making via a simple process of ordering and disordering. Amid the organic waves of pulsating biro gestures (a process that in each of these works was always shared between a man and a woman in accordance with the artist), the counterpoint between stability and chaos, simplicity and convolution, predictability and chance underlines a dichotomous beauty. Significantly, it is these binary relationships – Ordine e disordine as much as Alighiero e Boetti – that embody the very core of the artist's fundamentally dualistic practice.