Page 27 - PROTAGONIST-133

Previous page, Gemelli, 1968, photographic print (photomontage), Below: Embroideries by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti at the Tate Modern
15x10cm ©Archivio Alighiero Boetti / SIAE 2024 Museum, London ©Carl Court/AFP via Getty Images

Alighiero Boetti’s work is an exciting carousel of enigmas, adhere, to the point of merging with rare grace, to the cultures
intuitions and strokes of genius. He expresses himself with a he encounters. In him lives a deep feeling of human brotherhood
great variety of languages: from objects to sculptures, from biro and knowledge sharing. His work develops in accordance with and
drawings to watercolors, up to the work that has made him most thrives on the mix of civilizations and knowledge.
famous, tapestries. The series of tapestries, works of great and complex power, is
His career began in Turin in the early 1960s, where he a decorative jubilation of art and traditions that are both ancient
participated in the avant-garde movement known as Arte Povera; and very modern, near and far, that mix and intertwine just like
he then moved to Rome and his work became positively influenced the multicolored threads of embroidery. For him the solution is to
and enriched. ‘imagine everything’: the artist draws on the alphabet, breaking
He frequented the artists of Piazza del Popolo, among others it down letter by letter, which he then playfully assembles to form
Tano Festa, Franco Angeli, Mario Ceroli, Jannis Kounellis and, sentences of mathematical poetry. Each vowel, each consonant is a
above all, Mario Schifano, whom he doted. brick that is free to build any kind of architecture, settles precisely
Boetti was a curious and restless artist, his mind and body in the center of its box and becomes a small geometric picture, a
always on the move, a ‘citizen everywhere’, his biography speaks pattern, a piece of anthropological history, a revolutionary artistic
for him: from Italy to Afghanistan, from France to Pakistan. intuition. There are phrases and puns, alternating patterns and
He does not merely feed on suggestions. There is great shapes. Like small paintings, we see squares and circles, dots,
attraction towards adventure lived in the first person, towards arabesques, lines, and commas. Works that are both a graphic and
the journey, the elsewhere. He shows a natural disposition to literary composition.

Protagonist Art 25