Massimo De Carlo is happy to share, starting today, three seminal available works by Alighiero Boetti with the project, From One Day To The Next, a unique sequence of works presented throughout the weekend. From the 1970s onward, Boetti's colorful, mosaic-like, word square embroideries became one of the artist's most iconic system-based series. The embroideries play on the alternation between letter and background, full and empty spaces, and light and dark colors. Boetti spells out words, typically idiomatic expressions in Italian, often representing opposite and complementary realities. Alighiero Boetti's iconic embroidery works bring together ancient artisanal sewing techniques and a profound reflection on authorship. These works were designed by the artist and were subsequently hand-woven by Afghan artisans, becoming a symbol of Boetti's reflection on life and art.
Ordine e disordine
Ordine e disordine (Order and disorder) is the first sentence that Alighiero Boetti ever used for his series of embroideries. This exceptional work from 1977 is registered under the Archivio Alighiero Boetti with the number 3036. This iconic embroidery was realized in Kabul (Afghanistan) and, besides being one of Boetti's most well-known phrases, it is considered one of the artist's key principles. The composition, maintaining the same color pattern for the letter to background, is rigorously rendered in different intensities: a tangle of lilac, blue, green, and orange. Boetti himself described the subtle linguistic and formal play which often derives from the simple juxtaposition of opposite terms: "I have often worked on the concept of order and disorder: disordering order or creating order in disorder, or showing a visual disorder that is in fact the representation of mental order. It is only matter of knowing the rules: he who knows them not will never see the order that governs the universe. Faced with a starry sky, he will see only confusion, where as an astronomer would read it without issue". One of the most iconic exhibitions by Alighiero Boetti took place at Kunsthalle Basel in 1978, curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann. The exhibition brought together the famed Order and disorder works.