Art is meaning set in time and place, created from materials and intention.
As an artist seeing the work of Alighiero Boetti, I could feel his sense of discovery as he moved from material to material over time. Boetti's sense of tempo and articulation seemed to dance with his tongue-in-cheek challenge to the viewer to mentally interpret for themselves what is meant and what is not intended to have meaning.
I enjoyed his scrittura graffita for the color as temporal Renaissance reminiscence.
The Catasta tubes, hard and heavy, have a sense of weight but the same intentional placement of seeking out the letters in reading the list of names in Manifesto.
Boetti's twinning himself and duplicating images runs through this life-long exhibition and seems to remind us of our own duplication in making art: We duplicate our images, feelings, insights -- our beat and rhythm.
I don't know if I am making a leap in judgment in noticing that the "maps and woven wools" series is genius in capturing a time in Afghanistan that, even in the use of materials (rugs and weavings) captures a vision of a world as flags and places as nations and shows us the cracks and shatters occurring in the black and white, bang, bang, bang: a crack in the social fabric of a people. Victims become perpetrators... bang, bang, bang.
What sourced in one place changed the world. It always does.
As I left the exhibition, I felt a sense of relief that this artist's work had been collected, saved, and protected so the history of art expands. Culturally, we as viewers will, as well.