.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
This work is registered in the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome, under no. 2020.
'The drawings in Biro are concentrates of time, they convey to me a physical impression of extended, immense time' (Boetti quoted in Alighiero Boetti. Mettere al mondo il mondo, exh. cat. Frankfurst 1998, p. 59)
Comprising a sequence of commas, laid out in a systemised grid according to the letters of the alphabet arranged vertically at the side of the work, Boetti's coded linguistic system spells out (left-to-right) its self-reflexive title, 'uno, nove sette, sette' (1977) - a title which is also, the date in which the work was made - against four fluctuating monochrome fields of colour. Each of these hand-drawn colour fields has been made, by at least two people, one male the other female, according to instructions stipulated by Boetti and allowing for a variation of individual style, through a long painstaking process of cross-hatching with a coloured biro. The resultant picture is a self-defining extension in both space and time of the rules by which it came into being. 'All that is important is the rule', Boetti has said of these works, 'Anyone who does not know it, will never recognise the prevailing order in things, just as somebody who does not know the order of the stars will always see confusion where an astronomer has a very clear view of things.' (Boetti quoted in ibid, p. 311.)
Playful, tautological and often, as here, self-reflexive exercises, Boetti's Biro 'paintings' are open, self-defining images that are simultaneously full of apparent emptiness and meaning anchored to and around a simple code. As the typically self-reflexive title of this work Uno, Nove, Sette, Sette indicates, they are spatial and temporal extensions of the innate gap to be found between what Ferdinand Saussure famously called the 'signifier and the signified', into a beautiful and poetic pictorial expression of fixed system and perpetual flux.
'The drawings in Biro are concentrates of time, they convey to me a physical impression of extended, immense time' (Boetti quoted in Alighiero Boetti. Mettere al mondo il mondo, exh. cat. Frankfurst 1998, p. 59)
Comprising a sequence of commas, laid out in a systemised grid according to the letters of the alphabet arranged vertically at the side of the work, Boetti's coded linguistic system spells out (left-to-right) its self-reflexive title, 'uno, nove sette, sette' (1977) - a title which is also, the date in which the work was made - against four fluctuating monochrome fields of colour. Each of these hand-drawn colour fields has been made, by at least two people, one male the other female, according to instructions stipulated by Boetti and allowing for a variation of individual style, through a long painstaking process of cross-hatching with a coloured biro. The resultant picture is a self-defining extension in both space and time of the rules by which it came into being. 'All that is important is the rule', Boetti has said of these works, 'Anyone who does not know it, will never recognise the prevailing order in things, just as somebody who does not know the order of the stars will always see confusion where an astronomer has a very clear view of things.' (Boetti quoted in ibid, p. 311.)
Playful, tautological and often, as here, self-reflexive exercises, Boetti's Biro 'paintings' are open, self-defining images that are simultaneously full of apparent emptiness and meaning anchored to and around a simple code. As the typically self-reflexive title of this work Uno, Nove, Sette, Sette indicates, they are spatial and temporal extensions of the innate gap to be found between what Ferdinand Saussure famously called the 'signifier and the signified', into a beautiful and poetic pictorial expression of fixed system and perpetual flux.