Alighiero Boetti

Amedeo Porro arte moderna e contemporanea, Milan

Acquired from the above by the previous owner

Thence by descent to the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the work is more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some tiny thread pulls in isolated places.
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The present work is a magnificent exposition of Alighiero Boetti’s deep seated philosophical beliefs, and a worthy example of one of his best known series – the arazzi. Across 625 squares of multitudinous colour, Boetti deftly engages with constructs of language, mathematics, and the polarity between order and disorder to create a work of mesmerising invention. Completed only six years before the artist’s death, it exists as testament to the extraordinary level of poetic expression that Boetti attained in maturity.

Boetti believed that the world was characterised by the forces of ordine e disordine – order and disorder; that in order to understand the chaos of the natural world, humanity was forced to schematise and codify it into an organised mode of comprehension. Allied to this belief, and indeed not entirely separate from it, was his dedication to the notion of twinning or dualism – the idea that every force has a yin-and-yang-like equal and opposite force, and that they act not to subsume each other but rather to exist in harmonious equilibrium. It was because of these beliefs that he designed the arazzi in Rome but had them woven in the Middle East, either in Afghanistan or, as with the present work, in Peshawar, Pakistan. In this way, their split execution was fundamentally based on dualism and twinning and entirely imbued with ordine e disordine.

A central cross of Arabic script divides the work into four equal quadrants, all of which include three further lines of Arabic text in the centre. In each of the four corners, are blocks of four squares by four, featuring phrases that pertain to the philosophical background or creation of the work. In the upper corners we see Peshawar Pakistan and avere fame di vento (hungry for wind), while in the lower corners we see i verbi riflessivi (reflective verbs) and normale e anormale (normal and abnormal). The rest of the panel is dedicated to similar squares, populated by similar words and phrases, remarkable not only in many cases for their complexity and relevance, but also for the fact that each is exactly sixteen characters. In this way, we understand that the skill and genius of Boetti’s artistry is equally demonstrated in the linguistic manipulation of phrases, each of identical length, as in the final aesthetic appearance of the work.

We can also ascribe mathematical import to the composition of this work. The grid structure itself, measuring 25 by 25 squares, surely references the Pythagorean Magic Square. Boetti revered Pythagoras for the way that he used rigorous theorems to schematise and comprehend everything from trigonometry to musical harmony – in other words, the way he imposed human order on the disorder of the natural world in order to better comprehend it.

This work completely emblematises Boetti’s unique philosophical outlook: what at first seems an unjumbled disordered chaos is, after careful consideration, revealed to be an ingeniously designed scheme of accurate invention. The Arabic text poignantly alludes to the unique trans-global collaboration between the artist and the Afghan weavers and the clairvoyance of Boetti’s cosmopolitan approach to art production, which was heralded by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: “Boetti told me on that first encounter that in our time the art world would become much more of a polyphony of centres. It would go beyond Western art. He made me understand that globalisation would change the art world forever” (Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘One of the Most Important Days in My Life: Alighiero Boetti at Tate Modern’, Tate Etc., Issue 24, Spring 2012, online resource).