Opposite poles

The eye does not always tell us everything. Often, in fact, it is necessary to step outside established frameworks and understand how simple letters, everyday objects, geographical maps and apparently chaotic compositions conceal much broader concepts, capable of prompting audiences to question the meaning of life. This is precisely what lies at the heart of the work of Alighiero Boetti, a major Italian master of post-war art.
To celebrate his work, SMAC Venice presents Alighiero Boetti, an extensive retrospective that reconstructs the artist’s production and highlights the breadth and complexity of his practice.
Developed by curator Elena Geuna and supported by Ben Brown Fine Arts, the project brings together around eighty works displayed across eight rooms, spanning more than twenty-five years, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

Conceived as a kind of “constellation” inviting viewers to inhabit the space between idea and form, order and disorder, Alighiero Boetti reflects the artist’s enduring interest in duality, systems and process, tracing the evolution of his ideas while highlighting the lasting tensions at the core of his practice.
The exhibition opens with a section devoted to self-portraiture and the question of identity, which appears split, reflected and multiplied. It was precisely in the late 1960s that Boetti began exploring the theme of the double, understood not as division but as completion. His logic is based on the idea that every element of reality exists only in relation to its opposite: two distinct yet inseparable poles, each existing within the other.

As the exhibition progresses, a shift can be observed in the artist’s style, increasingly oriented towards structures that organise vision and knowledge while simultaneously exposing their instability. Beginning in the early 1970s, Boetti created several series of works, including the drawings Biro (Biro, 1972), Ricami (Embroideries, 1971) and Mappe (Maps, 1971). The artist dismantled the idea of the single author by entrusting the production of his works to artisans, allowing the time and culture of the other to become an integral part of the work’s meaning. Doubling thus evolved into a geopolitical investigation of distance and knowledge, in which the artwork embraces chance and otherness as foundational structural elements of multiplicity.
The final sections of the exhibition focus on Aerei (Airplanes, 1977), Calendari (Calendars, 1974) and the serial works on paper produced in the 1980s and early 1990s. Taken together, these series articulate an ongoing process in which systems are activated only to reveal their own limits, staging a prolonged, often playful exchange between control and chance.