Alighiero Boetti

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1970

Rome, Museo d'arte contemporanea Roma, Ritratto di una città #2: Arte a Roma 1960-2001, 2013

Colour: The catalogue illustration fails to convey the gridded patternation to all sheets and does not register the colour pencil on two of the sheets. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All sheets are attached verso to the backing board in several places. There are artist's pinholes in places along the edges of each sheet with a few minute associated tears. There is some extremely minor discolouration to the edges which is consistent with previous framing.
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“In fact in this ‘Cimento’ the only rule is that one must retrace everything. There are infinite possibilities of retracing the squares in different ways… in thousands of different ways, one different from the other and even in such a limited space the emotion and the state of mind with which you have created it emerges.”

(Alighiero Boetti in conversation with Mirella Bandini in: Exhibition Catalogue, Turin, Galleria Civica dell’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Alighiero Boetti: 1965 – 1994, 1996, n.p.).

Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione is a seminal work; a superb example from a landmark series, that marks the end of Alighiero Boetti’s interactions with the Arte Povera movement and the beginning of his mature style. Across these five large sheets of paper, Boetti charges his work with conceptual energy: it is one of the purest, boldest, and earliest expressions of that polarity between order and disorder which he believed characterised the entire universe. This work is one of the largest and earliest from this series. It is entirely in keeping with the best of Boetti’s oeuvre in the clarity of its conceptual expression, and the strength of its poetic voice.

The work represents a conscious shift away from the material significance of the Arte Povera movment, towards a more conceptual artistry. In its overt attempts to create art loaded with philosophical import and metaphysical content, it heralds the beginning of Boetti’s mature style. In his own words: “There had been too much focus on materials. In the end they had almost become more important than anything else. It had become like a grocery store. Therefore, yes, I remember that in the spring of ’69… I left everything as it was and started again from scratch, with a pencil and a sheet of paper. I took a sheet of squared paper and made my picture, Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione. It consisted of retracing each square. This is what starting again meant to me” (Alighiero Boetti quoted in: Gabriele Perretta, ‘L’art, gli artisti e il 68’, Flash Art, No. 147, December 1988, p. 69).

Ordine e disordine – order and disorder – were the central tenets of Boetti’s praxis, and are key to an interpretation of this work. He believed that the tension between human order and natural chaos characterised humanity’s attempts to formulate their own existence; that man was incapable of comprehending the unfathomable power and scale of the universe without imposing arbitrary schemes and systems upon it. The title of this work, roughly translated as ‘the contest between harmony and invention’, introduces it in this context, and alerts the viewer to the content of its seemingly formless composition.

Boetti imposes order on the disorder of his work. He formulates the chaos of the blank white page, boundless and unintelligible in its featureless expanse, into a schematised grid, so that it can be viewed and consumed in bite-size square chunks. He charts the blank ground into brutalist simplicity, so that it is instantly legible for even the briefest observer. Even the form of the grid itself is significant: it recalls Pythagorean magic squares and multiplication tables – mathematical structures used throughout history to impose comprehensible order onto the phenomena of the natural world.

Upon close inspection, Boetti’s devotion to the depiction of this grid is evidently obsessive. Two sheets are flecked with individual strokes of red ink, while the others are completed entirely in graphite. Boetti never wavers from the lattice form. However, he has no specified formulae for its completion. As such, we can see lines created in diagonal waves and tumbling downwards in blooming irregular shapes. This sense of controlled anarchy, of chaos expressed through a tightly controlled structure, proved entirely compelling for the artist: “In fact in this ‘Cimento’ the only rule is that one must retrace everything. There are infinite possibilities of retracing the squares in different ways… in thousands of different ways, one different from the other and even in such a limited space the emotion and the state of mind with which you have created it emerges” (Alighiero Boetti in conversation with Mirella Bandini in: Exhibition Catalogue, Torino, Galleria Civica dell’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Alighiero Boetti: 1965 – 1994, 1996, n.p.).

The miniscule imperfections and miniature deviations that these hand-drawn variations impart imbue the work with a temporal mood. Their aesthetic is inextricably linked to their human production, belying the short intervals of time that it took to create each one. Thus, through his formation of a complete grid, Boetti creates a system whereby the viewer is able to understand each panel not just in space, but also in time. Through Boetti’s imposition of a rigorous human order on his work, we are able to consume it not just in feet and inches, but in seconds, minutes, and hours.

This meticulous creation of fastidious grids against white plain paper is microcosmic: in creating such a scheme, Boetti imitates man’s compulsive desire to formulate his own existence – to comprehend our universal identity – by imposing arbitrary order on natural disorder. He is at once empathetic and satirical, showing supreme sensibility for man’s compulsion to codify his being, and yet simultaneously revealing its folly. From this point onwards, Ordine e Disordine would be the defining characteristics of Boetti’s lauded oeuvre. In Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione, they are distilled into absolute purity; it is a stunning exposition of Boetti’s conceptual confidence, and a testament to the integrity of his artistic clarity.