The Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti is renowned for his World Maps, which consisted of coloured tapestries reproducing the globe and made by women in Afghanistan. However throughout his artistic career, he produced many different series of works and he experimented with a wide range of materials.
The series I Colori on show at the Luxembourg & Dayan gallery, London next month, is a series of monochromes he made early in his career while he was living in Turin.
Italy in the post-war period was a boom nation and the Fiat company drove this growth with the production of Italian automobiles. The Fiat headquarters was in Turin thus the production of cars belonged from Turin. Boetti’s implication was that Italy in the late 1960s could only be experienced in the context of designed and branded commodities.
Boetti produced I Colori using Fiat industrial spray paints on squared metal panels. The monochromes reflected their surrounding culture. The artist was presenting a series of works with many new automobile paints stocked in local hardware stores in Turin, a car-conscious population. The nomenclature of the paint names such as Verde Ascot, Bianco Saratoga and Oro Longchamp reference the glamour of the racetracks and reflect the aspirational Italian post-war consumer culture that the automobile brands were tapping into.
The early monochromes first appeared at his debut exhibition in 1967 at Galleria Stein and at the Deposito dell’arte presente. Both spaces were based in Turin. Boetti presented a nucleus of works assembled and produced with industrial materials like wood, iron, fabric for camouflage, varnish.
In the series Boetti employs colour in a ready-made fashion with the most ordinary means available, fixing the material, cultural and aesthetic relationships in a succinct demonstration of colour as partaking in commodity fetishism.
 Alighiero Boetti, Fagus 511 61 951967. Industrial paint on cardboard 69 x 71 cm.
Private Collection, Switzerland, courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan
by Fausta Maria Bolettieri
Image courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan
I Colori by Alighiero Boetti is Luxembourg & Dayan, 2 Savile Row, London, W1S 3PA from 14 October 14 until December 13, 2014
Opening reception is on October 13, 6-8pm