(Turin 1940–1994 Rome)
Untitled, 1978, signed Alighiero e Boetti, signed, dated Alighiero e Boetti 1978 on the reverse, coloured crayons, pencil, postage stamps, photos, rubber stamps on thin cardboard, 40 x 50 cm, framed, (MCC)

Photo certificate:
Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome archive no. 2304 (11.3.2015)

Provenance:
Galleria Giuliana de Crescenzo, Rome (label on the reverse)
Acquired there by the present owner
Private Collection, Italy

Literature:
in Il Manifesto, 10 January 1981

Between 16 December and 25 April 1981, Alighiero Boetti published either one of his drawings or a picture of one of his works in the newspaper, Il Manifesto, on a daily basis.
The first of them, “Ordine e Disordine” [Order and Disorder], was published on his birthday (16 December), and the last one, a composition consisting of four sentences arranged in the shape of a square, came out on 25 April of the same year. In an introduction to this work, the critic Giambattista Salerno wrote, “If today’s image were simply an art image published in a newspaper, it would represent a normal episode of cultural information. The unusual thing about it is that tomorrow there will be another one, and the day after tomorrow yet another one, and yet a different one every day. This is a form of art that, instead of manifesting itself in time only on specific, hence special occasions, such as art exhibitions in galleries, also appears in the uncertain time of a daily paper”. All the pages from Il Manifesto containing Boetti’s publications were later collected in a single volume, which the artist had bound, and of which only one copy exists.
This valuable item, accompanied by copies of the newspaper, was displayed on the occasion of the exhibition, Boetti, Giornopergiorno, curated by M. Teresa Roberto, at the Fondazione per l’arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, Turin, in May 2011. “For Boetti, publishing his drawings in a newspaper – writes Ms Roberto, the curator – meant to accelerate the process of proliferation of the signs and thoughts with which he identified the final result of every artistic project. The artist thus dealt with the questions of serialisation and repetition, whilst at the same time exploring the diaristic dimension of time as structured by daily rituals in which current affairs and history meet.”

I used stamps because of their colour, just like an artist uses a brush or pastels.
Alighiero Boetti