Aerei (Planes)

A density of aeroplanes zipping off in all directions fills Alighiero Boetti’s Aerei (Planes) (1981). Across a cyan sky, they swoop and zigzag as they zoom off towards the edges of the pictorial plane. Eloquent and exuberant, Aerei is a thrillingly choreographed drawing from the artist’s homonymous series. The origins of this decade-long project can be traced to Boetti’s 1977 collaboration with the architect, cartoonist, and illustrator Guido Fuga. Together the duo created an almost encyclopedic visual typology of modern and historical aeroplanes in watercolour, precisely tracing each machine from magazine sources which Boetti had collected. Such painstaking detail can be seen in the present work in which every mechanism is precisely outlined. Rich with references to travel and exchange, Aerei underscores Boetti’s dream of transcending global discord, a vision which permeated both his artistic practice and personal life: he was itinerant and spent much of his life traversing the globe and working with an international network of artisans. Reflecting on his nomadism, Boetti said that ‘perhaps it comes from this schizophrenic idea that one cannot stay always in the same place’ (A. Boetti, quoted in When 2 is 1: The Art of Alighiero e Boetti, exh. cat. Contemporary Art Museum, Houston 2002, p. 93). His omnivorous approach to art mirrors this enthusiasm and in Aerei, Boetti gives image to the magic wonder of being a person in and of the world.