Catasta, 1966

Boetti was one of the artists grouped together under the umbrella of the Arte Povera group, and perhaps more than all of them, he cleared a new path, and was profusely influential, on later generations of artists from Italy and elsewhere. Boetti’s works in this collection are some of the major examples of his early research from 1966.

For the artist, Catasta (Pile), was the image of the contemporary condition, where there is an evaporation of every possibility of anything adhering, or of a vital, organizational relationship between built form and elements; what remains are only modules and undifferentiated materials, inevitably divided. Boetti writes: “I would like to specify here that there are some formal relationships between the natural ‘modularity’ of Catasta and the modularity of some forms of industrial design, or of certain works by Brancusi, but this doesn’t concern me since they are not central to the problem I’m interested in. The formal and psychological key for best penetrating the mental model represented by Catasta is the individual perceptive experience itself.” [...]