Alighiero Boetti
Aerei [Airplanes], 1988
Alighiero Boetti (1940 - 1994)
Aerei [Airplanes], 1988
Ball point pen on paper
150 x 300 x 3 cm
A self-taught artist, Alighiero Boetti left business school to dedicate himself to art. He became known in the 1960s for his assemblages of ordinary materials and objects associated with arte povera, but by the 1970s he was exploring more conceptual propositions and experimenting with multicolored tapestries. Aerei [Airplanes] is part of a series of large-scale drawings characterised by graphic renditions of airplanes that appear to fly across the sky of a blue, black, red or green color. These drawings were specially commissioned to architect and cartoonist Guido Fuga, who made planes of every size and shape, from fighter jets and passenger planes to cargo aircraft and Concordes. These illustrations appear arranged on the canvas in an almost ballet-like scene, soaring against a background that was sometimes painted in watercolor and other times in ball point pen, using small parallel marks. “I’ve done a lot of work on the concept of order and disorder,” explained the artist, “it’s just a question of knowing the rules of the game. Someone who doesn’t know them will never see the order that reigns in things.”