Alighiero Boetti

Immagine somiglianza (lit. ‹Image likeness›) belongs to a cycle ofworks realized with ballpoint pen on cardboard. For Boetti, the Biro as much as the tapestries represent a Western response to Afghan embroidery. In 1972, Boetti began the Biro cycle in the negative, so to say, that is with a white field on a dotted ballpoint pen background that was either black, blue, red or green. The structure common to all these works consisted of a «written» pattern punctuated by white commas. Each of the latter acquired the value of a letter if read against the principles of the Cartesian plane, whether the reading happened left to right, or whether the alphabet was laid out along the border.

The ballpoint pen background sampling is the result of a long and meticulous work that Boetti delegated to a variety of hands to emphasize the anonymity and plurality of the project’s authorship. A certain irony underlies the operation too, as the artist’s own words remark: «I have often had other people do the work, even though I would very much like to do it myself. I’d love to be able to go to the countryside with a blank sheet of paper and take six months to fill it up. I’d love to but I can’t. I can’t do it, I go crazy after two minutes. But since I like it, I find people who do it, a bit like in Muslim countries where if you can’t go to 1011 Mecca, you pay someone to go there for you and do your prayers, say all your things…».

The drawing of the different signs, of the alphabet, of the commas and of the words is always initially laid out by the artist himself. Boetti then commissioned people he trusted with the remaining work. Maria Angela De Gaetano, who coordinated the realisation of the ballpoint pen project from 1973, recalls the following: «I chose people from all neighborhoods, of all ages, and each and every one of them worked in a different way. The only rule to observe was not to let the white emerge in-between the cross-hatching. For the rest, everyone could work as they felt best. Some had a larger stroke, some were stiffer, others went about it in a more mechanical way, thinking, dreaming, a bit like automatic writing. Boetti often did not want me to tell him who had made the sheet, he liked to guess. He would recognize the stroke of a woman, then ask me about everyone else, about who they were and what they did in life. The work often took a long time.Personally, it took me a year and a half to complete the first piece, a one-sheet of five feet by more than four feet.»

The first Biro works realized in Turin were solely blue, while in Rome black, red and green were most often used. The writings were chosen according to different criteria: sometimes they were titles of other works, e.g., ‹Dare tempo al tempo›, ‹Raddoppiare dimezzando›; whereas some other times they were quotations, e.g., ‹La notte dà luce alla notte›. The writing of these phrases in different instances, with their variables in color and hatching techniques, lasted many years. The first reproductions that Boetti made of the covers of news magazines were the inspiration behind Immagine somiglianza. The latter was first conceived between 1975 and 1976, when Boetti realized the first montages with stencils against magazine covers. This very process eventually became central to Boetti’s ouvre in the ’80s.