Cinque x cinque venticinque (Five times five twenty-five)

Cinque x cinque venticinque (Five x Five Twenty-Five) (1988) is a magnificent suite of twenty-five embroideries by Alighiero Boetti. Each panel presents a five-by-five grid of capital letters in Boetti’s distinctive checkerboard style. Read vertically, each spells out the title ‘five x five twenty-five’ while also performing the square multiplication it describes. The same logic scales up to the assembly as a whole: the twenty-five small tapestries can themselves be arranged into a five-by-five grid. Displayed together, the total number of letter-squares is 25 x 25—or, in a different formulation, ‘five x five x twenty-five.’ This mathematical scheme is countermanded by the dazzling disarray of the tapestries’ colours, which result both from Boetti’s design and the choices made by the Afghan weavers who embroidered them in Peshawar, Pakistan. A chorus of vivid colour-combinations—teal and red, orange and mauve, magenta and olive—gives each panel its own chromatic identity, their shapes and patterns scintillating before the eyes. They exemplify 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’. Another twenty-five-part arrangement of Cinque x cinque venticinque (1988-1989) is held in the permanent collection of the Kunstmuseum den Haag, The Hague.

Boetti’s Arazzi began during his first visit to in Afghanistan in 1971. While he devised each work’s layout, the tapestries were woven by skilled craftswomen based in Kabul, and later—after the Soviet invasion of 1979—Afghan weavers who had fled to Pakistan. Through these collaborative, network-based projects, Boetti sidestepped the traditional post of the artist as supreme genius, relinquishing total control over the end product. In his series of Mappe (Maps), he let the weavers choose their own colours for the world’s oceans. His text-based embroideries sometimes incorporated Farsi script devised by the weavers and their supervisors. While every Cinque x cinque venticinque panel shares the same basic layout, they are all unique: within their distinct colour schemes are gentle irregularities, shifts of colour where spools of thread are finished and replaced, and the tactile presence of the artisans’ process. ‘Each one is different in colouring and the special style of the woman who made it’, said Boetti of the individual Arazzi. ‘So it is neither an original work nor a multiple’ (A. Boetti, quoted in N. Bourriaud, ‘Afghanistan’, Documents sur l’art contemporain, no. 1, October 1992, p. 50).

The element of ‘order’ in each text-based tapestry, meanwhile, was set out by Boetti’s design. Often indecipherable at first glance, the frameworks of letters reveal their meanings when read vertically, or sometimes in other directions. Many large, single-panel tapestries are composed of multiple smaller phrase-units. They might spell out word-games and Italian puns, Boetti’s own name, self-reflexive references to the date or place of the work’s creation, or—as in Cinque x cinque venticinque—a mathematical function. The translation of numbers into alphabetical form requires a further layer of close reading. ‘We see colours and patterns before we read,’ Mark Godfrey observes, ‘so that when we do read the phrases in these works, our understanding, delayed, is sharpened’ (M. Godfrey, ‘Divided Interests: The Art of Alighiero Boetti’, Artforum, May 2009, p. 209).

Boetti, who was fascinated as much by the rational structure of numbers as their imaginative potential, drew on Sufi mysticism and other sources for his numerical games. One antecedent is the ‘magic square’, a number-grid in which the sum of the rows, columns, and diagonals remains constant. The Shams al-Ma’arif (The Book of the Sun of Gnosis), an esoteric Sufi text dating from the 13^th century, tells of magic squares that function as spells, allowing communication with the angels and Djinn who rule the planets. Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I (1514) features a four-by-four magic square, containing 86 different four-number combinations that add up to the magic number 34. The square’s bottom row—4, 15, 14, 1—further encrypts Dürer’s initials and the date of the work’s creation: a Boettian gesture avant la lettre.

‘I designed some 150 words that could be arranged in a square’, said Boetti in 1992. ‘Today when I come across expressions like la forza del centro (‘the force of the centre’), a yoga concept, I know intuitively that the number of its letters allows it to form a square’ (A. Boetti, quoted in N. Bourriaud, ibid.). While he made squares in many different configurations, the five-by-five grid—and, in his large single-panel works, the twenty-five-by-twenty-five grid—retained a special importance for the artist. ‘Twenty-five is the square of the holy number five’, he explained, ‘and is therefore also the centre of magical squares. It consists of the sum of the numbers 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9, and thus contains all the holy numbers which can be used in magic’ (A. Boetti, quoted in Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo, exh. cat. Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt 1998, p. 117). In Cinque x cinque venticinque, with its dizzying, nested semiotic systems coming apart and together in a modular symphony of order and disorder, the magical multiplicity of Boetti’s vision comes to life.