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Lot Essay
Oggi è il decimo giorno del sesto mese dell’anno millenovecentottantotto accanto al Pantheon (1988) is a complex and beautiful example of Alighiero Boetti’s Arazzi (tapestries). It consists of a 25-by-25 grid of embroidered letters in his distinctive checkerboard format. The letters create a dazzling display of colour and symbol, only cohering into words on careful inspection. The work’s title—which describes its conception on 10 June 1988, ‘next to the Pantheon’—can be read vertically in a 9 x 9 grid at the centre. Following the vertical and horizontal midpoints twice reveals ‘Peshawar / Pakistan’, where the work was woven. The rest of the work consists of 4 x 4 units, which spell out some of Boetti’s favourite phrases: Il silenzio è d’oro (‘silence is golden’) Fuso ma non confuso (‘mixed but not mixed up’), Dare tempo al tempo (‘giving time to time’), Immaginando tutto (‘imagining everything’). With its colourful, nested semiotic systems, the work embodies Boetti’s guiding principle of ordine e disordine: the notion that a global state of equilibrium is created by the constant flux between ‘order and disorder.’
The balance of ordine e disordine is threaded through the very fabric of these works. While Boetti designed their layouts in Rome, they were woven by skilled craftswomen based in Afghanistan, and later—after the Soviet invasion of 1979—Afghan weavers who had fled to Pakistan. Through these collaborative, network-based projects, Boetti introduced layers of translation, distance and variation into his work. Although the text-based Arazzi are all composed of the same basic visual units—capital letters within single squares—each is imbued with unique irregularities and the tactile presence of the artisans’ process. A red ‘N’ at the present work’s centre incorporates a stripe of orange, and its ‘T’s are missing their crossbars. No letter has a fixed colour identity, and their chromatic shifts create a scintillating flux amid the graphic structure of the alphabet. The work is among many Arazzi that include self-reflexive references to the year and place of their making, heightening the sense of them as objects in time, and the countless hours of labour they contain.
Boetti played many different games with text, mathematics and other sign systems across his oeuvre. He asked whether these artificial languages, by which we map and understand the world, could impose order on the complexities of reality. The present work, with its intricate series of grids within grids, celebrates both its ingenious ordering structure and the brilliant chaos into which it so easily falls apart. Our satisfaction as we decrypt the embroidery’s messages is matched by our pleasure at the sheer optical splendour of its colours and shapes. Order and disorder coexist, neither overwhelming the other: a voice emerges as if by magic, only to sink back into the glorious melee of the world.
The balance of ordine e disordine is threaded through the very fabric of these works. While Boetti designed their layouts in Rome, they were woven by skilled craftswomen based in Afghanistan, and later—after the Soviet invasion of 1979—Afghan weavers who had fled to Pakistan. Through these collaborative, network-based projects, Boetti introduced layers of translation, distance and variation into his work. Although the text-based Arazzi are all composed of the same basic visual units—capital letters within single squares—each is imbued with unique irregularities and the tactile presence of the artisans’ process. A red ‘N’ at the present work’s centre incorporates a stripe of orange, and its ‘T’s are missing their crossbars. No letter has a fixed colour identity, and their chromatic shifts create a scintillating flux amid the graphic structure of the alphabet. The work is among many Arazzi that include self-reflexive references to the year and place of their making, heightening the sense of them as objects in time, and the countless hours of labour they contain.
Boetti played many different games with text, mathematics and other sign systems across his oeuvre. He asked whether these artificial languages, by which we map and understand the world, could impose order on the complexities of reality. The present work, with its intricate series of grids within grids, celebrates both its ingenious ordering structure and the brilliant chaos into which it so easily falls apart. Our satisfaction as we decrypt the embroidery’s messages is matched by our pleasure at the sheer optical splendour of its colours and shapes. Order and disorder coexist, neither overwhelming the other: a voice emerges as if by magic, only to sink back into the glorious melee of the world.