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Lot Essay
Created in 1967—the year of the artist’s very first solo exhibition at Galleria Christian Stein in Turin— Bleu Cannes 497 and Grigio Dover 207 belong to Alighiero Boetti’s seminal early series of Vernici industriali (Industrial Paints). Each consists of a square board affixed with cork letters, which spell out the name and code of the industrial automobile paint with which it has been coated. Rather than sites of spiritual or formal purity, these monochromes are boldly self-referential readymades. In line with the ethos of Arte Povera, or ‘poor art’—a term coined by critic Germano Celant in the same year he made his debut—Boetti made critical and playful use of everyday materials in his early practice. His hometown of Turin was in its industrial heyday, home to Fiat’s headquarters and a hotbed of car culture. In the Vernici industriali, with his use of automotive pigments from local hardware stores, Boetti suggested that even colour itself—the locus of centuries of artistic passion in Italy—had become subsumed into a world of consumerist experience and brand identity.
The car manufacturers of the 1960s offered Boetti a rich palette of choice. One 1967 sampler proposes six different shades of red for your Fiat: if you wanted a neutral tone, you might consider not only Beige sabbia (sandy beige) but also Avorio chiaro (light ivory), Avorio antico (old ivory) or two different kinds of white. Grigio Dover and Bleu Cannes are among the colours—alongside others such as Oro Longchamp and Argento Auteuil—whose names conjured up chic locations and far-flung racecourses. Advertisers, car-makers and artists alike were attuned to the aspirational and romantic power of colour. Bleu Cannes 497 might also be read as a sly nod from Boetti to Yves Klein’s transcendent blue monochromes, which had their own origins in the skies of the French Riviera.
Boetti used an array of commonplace and pre-fabricated materials to make the works for his inaugural show at Galleria Christian Stein, including Perspex, PVC tubing, electrical wire and military camouflage fabric. Each was linked to the factory production of newly industrialised northern Italy. The show also featured a group of painted monochromes that would lead to the Vernici industriali later that year. They shared the present works’ format of cork letters on board, displaying phonetic exercises—the thin thumb, stiff upper lip, frou frou—from a phrasebook used by Boetti’s wife while she was teaching English. In the Vernici industriali, Boetti condensed the free-floating lyricism of this idea to incorporate the name of the paint itself into one succinct, self-reflexive statement, showing how words and colour alike were bound up in the modern allure of the commodity.
Unbeknownst to both artists, Boetti was making his Vernici industriali at almost the exact same time Gerhard Richter made his first ‘colour-chart’ paintings in West Germany. Like Boetti, Richter was engaged in a Pop-adjacent exploration of colours as consumer goods. Where Richter’s interest in commercial colour samplers was largely compositional, however—the colours were arranged in arbitrary grids, without any apparent regard for aesthetic effect—Boetti’s presentation of the individual colours, marked with their brand-names, foregrounded them as cultural objects of their time. Having made some of the defining contributions to the movement, Boetti largely abandoned the tactics of Arte Povera by 1969, expanding his practice in more conceptual, networked and mystical directions. His ingenious use of colour and words in the Vernici industriali would nonetheless remain central to many of his later series, from his vibrant text-based tapestries to the alphabetic games in his biro works. Reflecting the everyday surfaces of industrial Turin back at itself, they also establish his artistic philosophy of mettere al mondo il mondo: ‘bringing the world into the world.’
The car manufacturers of the 1960s offered Boetti a rich palette of choice. One 1967 sampler proposes six different shades of red for your Fiat: if you wanted a neutral tone, you might consider not only Beige sabbia (sandy beige) but also Avorio chiaro (light ivory), Avorio antico (old ivory) or two different kinds of white. Grigio Dover and Bleu Cannes are among the colours—alongside others such as Oro Longchamp and Argento Auteuil—whose names conjured up chic locations and far-flung racecourses. Advertisers, car-makers and artists alike were attuned to the aspirational and romantic power of colour. Bleu Cannes 497 might also be read as a sly nod from Boetti to Yves Klein’s transcendent blue monochromes, which had their own origins in the skies of the French Riviera.
Boetti used an array of commonplace and pre-fabricated materials to make the works for his inaugural show at Galleria Christian Stein, including Perspex, PVC tubing, electrical wire and military camouflage fabric. Each was linked to the factory production of newly industrialised northern Italy. The show also featured a group of painted monochromes that would lead to the Vernici industriali later that year. They shared the present works’ format of cork letters on board, displaying phonetic exercises—the thin thumb, stiff upper lip, frou frou—from a phrasebook used by Boetti’s wife while she was teaching English. In the Vernici industriali, Boetti condensed the free-floating lyricism of this idea to incorporate the name of the paint itself into one succinct, self-reflexive statement, showing how words and colour alike were bound up in the modern allure of the commodity.
Unbeknownst to both artists, Boetti was making his Vernici industriali at almost the exact same time Gerhard Richter made his first ‘colour-chart’ paintings in West Germany. Like Boetti, Richter was engaged in a Pop-adjacent exploration of colours as consumer goods. Where Richter’s interest in commercial colour samplers was largely compositional, however—the colours were arranged in arbitrary grids, without any apparent regard for aesthetic effect—Boetti’s presentation of the individual colours, marked with their brand-names, foregrounded them as cultural objects of their time. Having made some of the defining contributions to the movement, Boetti largely abandoned the tactics of Arte Povera by 1969, expanding his practice in more conceptual, networked and mystical directions. His ingenious use of colour and words in the Vernici industriali would nonetheless remain central to many of his later series, from his vibrant text-based tapestries to the alphabetic games in his biro works. Reflecting the everyday surfaces of industrial Turin back at itself, they also establish his artistic philosophy of mettere al mondo il mondo: ‘bringing the world into the world.’