The Frieze Art Fair opens in London next week and contemporary art experts and fans are debating about what to see and which talks we shouldn't be missing. Yet, rather than being useful to discover new artists, the art debate around contemporary fairs and the satellite events organised around them are proving more helpful in bridging the gap between different generations of artists and in introducing to younger visitors established yet at times forgotten artists.
London-based gallery Luxembourg & Dayan will for example be presenting at their booth in Frieze Masters (F09) an exhibition entitled "Monochromes" focusing on the dialogue between various artists (Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and Gerhard Richter among the others) and colour. This event will complement a larger exhibition about a complex figure who had a pivotal role on the international art scene, Italian artist Alighiero Boetti.
"Alighiero Boetti: I Colori" will investigate and celebrate the use of colour in the artist's works. Born in Turin in 1940, Boetti took part in 1967 in various exhibitions with the Arte Povera group, mainly employing in his works unusual and industrial materials including iron, wood, glass, concrete and metal. In 1969 Boetti took part in one of the most prestigious and emblematic exhibitions of his time, "When Attitudes Become Form" (Bern, 1969), but, at the end of the decade, he started developing a very personal language and left the Arte Povera group behind to pursue further interests in the following decades. Throughout the '70s he focused on themes such as politics, geography and information – his new interests – travelling back and forth to Afghanistan where he launched embroidery workshops with local groups of craftswomen who helped him creating his first maps of the world and later on his compositions with letters. Geometry and mathematics also became part of his artistic language and, in the following decade, he took part in further exhibitions and designed costumes for theatrical performances. An eclectically versatile figure, Boetti died in 1994, but in the last few years there have been quite a few events and retrospectives paying homage to him.
Boetti's output is extremely vast, ranging from pencil "exercises" on graph paper, based on musical or mathematical rhythms, to monumental projects like his 50 tapestries with texts in Italian and Persian, but visitors at Luxembourg & Dayan will be able to rediscover his early monochromes from 1967 (originally displayed at Galleria Stein in Turin). The latter featured superimposed prefabricated cork letters centred upon uniformly square wood and metal panels coloured by a single industrial pigment.
Though they were produced at the beginning of his career while he lived in Turin, the monochromes are inspired by some of the themes that Boetti developed and explored in depth throughout his career, including repetition, the dialectic exchange between two selves and the inadequacy of language, symbolised by phonetic exercises spelling "The Thin Thumb", "Stiff Upper Lip" and "Frou Frou", sentences taken from the English phrasebooks that Boetti’s wife used for teaching English, and that do not have any connections with the coloured background on which they are represented.
As he continued his experiments, Boetti transformed the initial monochromes by amalgamating the name and code number of the paint colour he was using in a singular statement that literally became the work. "Some of the best moments in Arte Povera were hardware shop moments," Boetti once stated, and it's impossible to disagree with him when you discover the Pantone-like names of the colours he used - Verde Ascot (Ascot Green), Bianco Saratoga (Saratoga White), Oro Longchamp (Longchamp Gold), Beige Sahara (Sahara Beige) and Bleu Cannes (Cannes Blue), some of them referencing the glamour of the racetracks or evoking trips to faraway countries and exotic lands.
Developing his studies around colours and culture, Boetti came up with the diptych "Rosso Gilera 60 1232 - Rosso Guzzi 60 1305", that incorporate paints for automotive vehicles stocked in local hardware stores in Turin, home to the Fiat headquarters and a car-conscious population. In this way, the artist bridged the gap between colours and branded commodities while referencing via non-identical reds the industry and the loyalties and passions of Italian post-War consumers for one motorcycle brand or the other.
In later works Boetti replaced words with figures representing significant dates. In 1971 the artist made a diptych with two dates: "16 December 2040", the 100th anniversary of his birth, and "11 July 2023", the date he predicted would be his own death. Time and destiny were therefore linked in these later monochromes that reunited the confines of Boetti's life and proved that colours, words, numbers and dates can help an artist creating a perfect language and visual code capable of hinting at and explaining both personal and global issues.
"Alighiero Boetti: i Colori", Luxembourg & Dayan, 2 Savile Row, London, W1S 3PA UK, 14th October - 13th December 2014; "Monochromes", Luxembourg & Dayan, Frieze Masters (F09), Regent's Park, London, 14th - 19th October 2014.
Image credits for this post
The Thin Thumb
1967
Industrial paint on wood
50 x 50 cm.
Private Collection, courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan.
Rosso Gilera 60 1232
Rosso Guzzi 60 1305
1967
Industrial varnish on metal, in two parts.
Each 70 x 70 cm.
Private Collection, courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan.
Fagus 511 61 95
1967
Industrial paint on cardboard
69 x 71 cm.
Private Collection, courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan.
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