Alighiero Boetti, or, as he signed in his later years in order to distinguish himself from his personage, "Alighiero and Boetti", has for many years been one of the most international of Italian contemporary artists, known especially for his famous tapestries where he used colored letters within colored grids to spell out linguistic expressions, dates, sentences...

Boetti began his career in the late Sixties in his hometown of Turin, participating in the movement known as Arte Povera. But it wasn't long before he abandoned both his city and the movement to devote himself to research of the conceptual and mathematical matrix. He moved to Rome in the early Seventies and, during that time, discovered the Middle East, particularly Afghanistan, where he bought a hotel, the One Hotel, and where, in 1971, he realized his first embroidery: two pieces of fabric with two dates, December 16th, 2040 - July 11th, 2023, the centenary of the artist's date of birth and of the presumed date of his death. Another game within a game: to begin with his own end.

After that first tapestry in Kabul, Boetti embarks on a full artistic project, entrusting it into the expert hands of local embroiderers.

However, eight years later everything is abruptly interrupted: it is the beginning of the war, followed by the seizure of his hotel and the impossibility for foreigners to remain in the country. The year is 1979; from that moment on, the tapestries, with the exception of the maps, will all be produced in Pakistan and, perhaps in order to differentiate them from his early production, the letters become smaller.

Aste Bolaffi is particularly proud to present an iconic work from the last year of Boetti's adventure in Afghanistan: a large tapestry with a predominance of a deep midnight blue, illuminated by the many colors of its alphabet. In the tapestry, from top to bottom, from right to left, all possible numerical combinations are written in letters to write the date of creation of the tapestry itself, a prophetic 1978.

The other opus being presented by Aste Bolaffi is a summa of two important themes of Boetti's, again from the late Seventies, the Biro and the airplane, a series of works in which the execution is again delegated to third parties, but with a greater awareness on the part of the artist that just being the director and being able to leave room for interactions which are not entirely predictable, is what actually makes the work precious and unique.
 

In the airplane series, Boetti commissions a designer to create airplanes which are precise from every perspective and angle, then asks others to fill the sky using Bic ballpoint pens (Biros).

The result is a triptych with an "explosion" of airplanes coming towards us in a sky/sea of blue ink waves. In reference to this series of works, the artist said: "It is an ideal, dreamed of, imaginary sky (even if my planes are actual planes, which actually exist and fly every day! They go everywhere, in every direction, and travel throughout the whole world) ...one day it will be possible. Planes will no longer be flown by men but by robots, and everything will be calculated. In a few years, my work will be the true representation of the sky!"

Today, advanced aerial tracking systems allow us to view flights in real time and to know - as Boetti dreamed - the characteristics, route and location of each individual aircraft, simultaneously. (di Caterina Fossati)

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