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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome, under number 2520.
Executed in 1969, Cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione is a seminal early work dating from the period immediately following Boetti's excursions in Arte Povera. Following his participation in an Arte Povera exhibition, he became tired of the glut of materials that littered the gallery and indeed his own studio:
'... in the spring of '69 I left the studio I had in Turin, which had become a warehouse for materials, full of asbestos lumber, cement, stones. I left everything exactly as it was and started again from scratch, with a pencil and a sheet of paper. I took a sheet of squared paper and made a picture, Cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione. It consisted of re-tracing each square. This is what starting again meant for me' (Alighiero Boetti, cited in A. Soldaini, 'Alighiero e Boetti', pp. 6-25, in Alighiero e Boetti, exh.cat., London, 1999, p. 12).
Several works of this title exist, the present example comprising eleven sheets and therefore giving a palpable sense of the time that Boetti spent in its creation. The minute lines that he has worked into this squared paper give a sense of the artist's activity, on the one hand mind-numbing (hence the contest against invention of the title) and on the other meditative, a trance-like activity hinting at the interest in Oriental thought and religion that would come to the fore in the subsequent years.
The sense of harmony of the title was explained by Boetti, who felt awe before these sheets and who found great freedom in his time-consuming process, despite the apparent limitations of the formal format of this work:
'the experience of the small squares was one that I can't convey, but an incredible one, because I myself in front of a completely new space, and with this support, or the idea of retracing... it gave me tremendous freedom... All manner of things happened in those squares, I wrote some terrible or beautiful things, secret things which were then filled in because the only rule was to fill in, without any constraints of time or of reason, especially the first times' (Boetti, cited in ibid., p. 12).
In this way, Cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione both reveals and conceals the artist. The pen lines are the traces of his existence, tied to this work for long hours, making this an intensely autobiographical relic. Yet at the same time, there is no hint of the personal and even the intimate thoughts that entered the work have been deliberately eradicated, creating an intriguing tension between the hidden and the visible.
Executed in 1969, Cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione is a seminal early work dating from the period immediately following Boetti's excursions in Arte Povera. Following his participation in an Arte Povera exhibition, he became tired of the glut of materials that littered the gallery and indeed his own studio:
'... in the spring of '69 I left the studio I had in Turin, which had become a warehouse for materials, full of asbestos lumber, cement, stones. I left everything exactly as it was and started again from scratch, with a pencil and a sheet of paper. I took a sheet of squared paper and made a picture, Cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione. It consisted of re-tracing each square. This is what starting again meant for me' (Alighiero Boetti, cited in A. Soldaini, 'Alighiero e Boetti', pp. 6-25, in Alighiero e Boetti, exh.cat., London, 1999, p. 12).
Several works of this title exist, the present example comprising eleven sheets and therefore giving a palpable sense of the time that Boetti spent in its creation. The minute lines that he has worked into this squared paper give a sense of the artist's activity, on the one hand mind-numbing (hence the contest against invention of the title) and on the other meditative, a trance-like activity hinting at the interest in Oriental thought and religion that would come to the fore in the subsequent years.
The sense of harmony of the title was explained by Boetti, who felt awe before these sheets and who found great freedom in his time-consuming process, despite the apparent limitations of the formal format of this work:
'the experience of the small squares was one that I can't convey, but an incredible one, because I myself in front of a completely new space, and with this support, or the idea of retracing... it gave me tremendous freedom... All manner of things happened in those squares, I wrote some terrible or beautiful things, secret things which were then filled in because the only rule was to fill in, without any constraints of time or of reason, especially the first times' (Boetti, cited in ibid., p. 12).
In this way, Cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione both reveals and conceals the artist. The pen lines are the traces of his existence, tied to this work for long hours, making this an intensely autobiographical relic. Yet at the same time, there is no hint of the personal and even the intimate thoughts that entered the work have been deliberately eradicated, creating an intriguing tension between the hidden and the visible.