Alighiero e Boetti: The Interweaving of Time and Place – By Dominique Gonfard

As a key player in the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Alighiero e Boetti developed a distinct style grounded in cultural investigation and the creative concept.

Alighiero e Boetti: The Interweaving of Time and Place

By Dominique Gonfard

 

 

 

 

 

As a key player in the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Alighiero e Boetti developed a distinct style grounded in cultural investigation and the creative concept. A range of his work, including drawings as well as his ongoing series, entitled Mappa, is currently at Chelsea’s Barbara Gladstone Gallery through March 27th. From the artists delicate weavings to his provocatively lifeless renderings of magazine covers, a sense of intimacy in each work is offered, and the otherwise distanced faces that stand as Boetti’s inspiration are transformed into the everyday individuals who bring color to his maps. To Boetti, a work is never complete without the final interpretation of the viewer. Being surrounded by his embroidered canvases is like stepping into the world of its craftsmen and joining in their message of unity and human spirit.

With clear political motivations, Boetti outlined patterns that he then commissioned weavers in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 1971 and 1994. Creating a continuous historical series, Boetti’s canvases map not only the presence of the cultures they graph, but also the personalities who formed them. The works reference quilting, a traditional craft, employed by cultures worldwide for centuries as a forum for storytelling and cultural unity. Mappa coincides with similar embroidered works of energetically colored bodies, including Tutto, a work constructed in Peshawar in 1989. In each example, precise stitching fills the frame from corner to corner and implies a blending of borders between not only arms and legs but also individual and cultural differences.

The strength behind Boetti’s vision clearly communicates using its medium as a vehicle of action. In Copertina,1986, a sequential piece documenting an international selection of magazine covers, the viewer is drawn into an examination of the standards of beauty and fame upheld throughout the world. Boetti’s work exposes and explains these conventions as artificial consturcts. Groupings of covers are portrayed in monochromic pencil on paper. Political and popular events are shown side by side, blurring the serious with the momentary and allowing the viewer to crate their own continuum of value and importance. The artist’s hand is steadily present, and, like in Mappa, the viewer is invited to witness the artist’s act of personal observation within the confines of documentary history.

To Boetti, each work of art is a choice. Every stitch and line signifies a deliberate direction taken in a specific moment in time. His work is warm and quiet, drawing the viewer into worlds of compassion and craftsmanship. Through his work, faces, once impenetrable political and popular leaders, are interwoven with the intimacy of handmade maps. The viewer leaves serenely pondering a message of worldwide beauty and compassion.