ALIGHIERO BOETTI

Alighiero Boetti, born in Turin in 1940, one of the leading exponents of the “poor art “, used to sign often adding an” e “between first and last name, to emphasize a split, the presence in himself of two thoughts, two twins, two separate entities.

And also in his work of curious artist about everything and always divided between semiotics and aesthetics, between philosophy and game, he loved to find two different times, including the design and the realization, using anonymous hands that run behind a specific project of his works .

This is the case probably of his most famous cycle, with hand-embroidered tapestries, which began producing in the 70’s and continued to produce with different themes until 1994, when he then died.

After having drawn them in every single spot of colour, Boetti commissioned their realization to by embroiderers in Afghanistan first and then to Pakistan, where they escaped after the Soviet invasion of their country.

In some interviews he said that for more complex tapestries, several meters long, it could take several years before receiving the finished piece and when finally these works of patience and virtuous skill returned to him, he welcomed them as unexpected things, like robberies that was happy to have done.

He was on in our cinemas in June, Bright Star, the tender and poignant new film by Jane Campion. The title is taken from a sonnet by the English romantic poet John Keats who died in Rome in 1821, where he had gone to spend the winter trying to fight the tuberculosis. Although at that time he was only 25 years old, he was able to write poems that are enough to make him one of the greatest poets of England. The film talks about his troubled and eternal love for his neighbour Fanny Brawne. Exactly on the poet’s muse, a fashion student, which makes beautiful clothes and that in principle for this reason she seems frivolous and superficial to Keats, the eyes of the New Zealand director seem to be focused throughout his filmography, he has always shown to prefer the sentimental and secret universe of women. Beautiful are the costumes designed by Janet Patterson, and thanks to this fatigue he was nominated for the Oscar and wonderful as the whole picture is the initial picture, with the enlarged detailed of the needle that pierces the fabric, and of the patient hand that sews.