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Lot Essay
Among the most elegant and distilled of Alighiero Boetti’s self-reflexive creations, Emme I Elle Elle E… (1970) is a work whose form is determined solely by a reference to its own conception. It comprises a 7 x 7 grid of squares, each containing a letter, that collectively spell out the year that it was made. Reading from top left to bottom right reveals the words EMME I ELLE ELLE E ENNE O VI E CI E ENNE TI O ESSE E TI TI A ENNE TI A: these phonetically transcribed Italian characters together spell Millenovecentosettanta, or 1970. Boetti’s very first articulation of the concept for Emme I Elle Elle E… was this exquisite pencil drawing on graph paper (lot 41), which served as the blueprint for all his subsequent expressions of the idea. The ensuing works, all made in 1970, took a variety of forms, including crocheted lace, spray-painted stencils, two wooden examples and, as also offered from the present collection, an impressive 35 x 35 cm version in spray-painted cast iron (lot 40).
As in so many of Boetti’s works, an apparently disordered group of individual forms—here rendered in a kind of magic square of lettering—is collated into a cohesive and ultimately meaningful order. The work playfully reveals a sense of the hidden structures of language, order and time while also appearing to do little more than reflect back upon itself. A succinct demonstration of his concept of ordine e disordine (‘order and disorder’), it is also one of the first examples in Boetti’s oeuvre of the investigation of language and semantics that would later distinguish the embroidered letter-squares seen in many of his tapestries, as well as the linguistic systems of his biro works.
The light, free-form particles of green spray-paint which cover the cast-iron version of Emme I Elle Elle E… represented a direct formal contrast to the rigid form of the metal square. In a number of exhibitions of these works, Boetti would spray-paint over just such a block while it hung on the wall, creating a vaporous haze of pigment that served as an airy and amorphous opposite to the iron grid’s precision, order and density. As the cloud of colour hovered in the air, language, speech, time and meaning were visually shown to be suspended between legibility and confusion. It is in that suspension, so gracefully captured in the two present works, that the magic of Boetti’s art resides.
As in so many of Boetti’s works, an apparently disordered group of individual forms—here rendered in a kind of magic square of lettering—is collated into a cohesive and ultimately meaningful order. The work playfully reveals a sense of the hidden structures of language, order and time while also appearing to do little more than reflect back upon itself. A succinct demonstration of his concept of ordine e disordine (‘order and disorder’), it is also one of the first examples in Boetti’s oeuvre of the investigation of language and semantics that would later distinguish the embroidered letter-squares seen in many of his tapestries, as well as the linguistic systems of his biro works.
The light, free-form particles of green spray-paint which cover the cast-iron version of Emme I Elle Elle E… represented a direct formal contrast to the rigid form of the metal square. In a number of exhibitions of these works, Boetti would spray-paint over just such a block while it hung on the wall, creating a vaporous haze of pigment that served as an airy and amorphous opposite to the iron grid’s precision, order and density. As the cloud of colour hovered in the air, language, speech, time and meaning were visually shown to be suspended between legibility and confusion. It is in that suspension, so gracefully captured in the two present works, that the magic of Boetti’s art resides.