Private Collection, Japan

London, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Alighiero Boetti, un Pozzo senza Fine, Embroideries, 2006, pp. 68-69, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is some light wear to the bottom right extreme corner tip, with associated loose threads of fabric, only noticeable upon close inspection. There is a slight undulation to the tapestry, inherent to the artist's chosen media. A light ochre-coloured spot of discolouration can be seen to the baby blue hand in the lower left quadrant of the composition, approximately 10 cm. left of centre. A few scattered minute white and coloured fibres have adhered to the composition in places, visible upon close inspection only.
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This work is registered in the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome, under number 4352 and is accompanied by a photo-certificat꧙💜e of authenticity

Tutto emerges from a vision of the world in which everything meets. It also presents a notion of 'fullness', understood as the ability to encompass everything, as the desire to dissolve one's own self (Perdita d'identità) in the indistinct flow of life and its countless fragments."
Antonella Soldaini, 'Alighiero e Boetti' in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Alighiero e Boetti, 1999, p. 23

The present work 🐓is part of an important and rare series of Boetti's embroideries, executed during the last fifteen years of the artist's life. However, the key concept underpinning this work, namely the representation♔ of the universal whole in all its creation, was of constant importance throughout his life.

In 1969, the artist conceived a work, subsequently destroyed, entitled Pack. Essentially a circular block of cement, Pack was characterised by a pattern of irregular cracks across its surface which had occurred naturally during its drying process. Whilst closer examination allowed perception of the unique character of each of these cracks, when observed entirely, the overwhelming impact was the outline of the work as a whole. As Anne-Marie Sauzeau noted, for Boetti this discovery within Pack, was "the primordial and unitarian representation of the world, a compact mass similar to the Danish coast's ice slabs, more or less joined together. A kind of disconnected puzzle that is adrift, that gradually differentiates and proliferates like a cellular division, or in the same way continents drift." (Exhibition Catalogue, Alighiero Boetti 1965-1994, Turin, 1996-1997, p. 41)

The nature of Pack, in which the necessarily abstract shapes represented an almost elemental glimpse of an undetermined universe, informed much of Boetti's work, including Tutto. In these works, objects from everyday life find themselves scattered in a non-hierarchical substrate: stacked on one another in seemingly random fashion. From a distance, the effect is of a wiღldly rhythmic phantasmagoria of random shapes and colours, yet closer inspecti🌞on reveals individual forms familiar from everyday experience.

A series of drawings Boetti executed in the 1980s, significantly titled Perdita d'Identita (Loss of Identity), eওxpose the process of the abstraction of individual figurative images. In these, a hand, a toy, an animal or an aeroplane comes to assume an abstract nature when incorporated indistinctly into a broader composition. Each form is created from, and incorporated into, the next, so that the determination of the overall work eventually escapes the control of the artist – the composition appears to create itself. 

According to the artist, the composition of Tutto was intended to be very democratic, non-exclusionary, and entirely disordered – the only rule being that each image's outline facilitates another. Boetti explains the creative process as follows: "I asked my assistants to draw everything, every possible shape, abstract or figurative, and to amalgamate them until the paper sheet was saturated. Then I took the drawing to Afghanistan to get it embroidered with 90 kinds of different coloured threads, provided that there was an equal quantity of each of them. The different colour of each shape is chosen by the women. In order to avoid establishing any hierarchy among them, I use them all. Actually, my concern is to avoid to make choices according to my taste and to invent systems that will then choose on my behalf." (Alighiero Boetti cited in Adachiara Zevi, Alighiero e Boetti: Scrivere, Ricamare, Disegnare, Corriere della Sera, 19th January 1992)

This sense of ordered randomness reflected Boetti's interest in Sufism, a mystical tradition in Islam. Boetti spent a great deal of time conversing with Sufi scholars, including the poet Berang Ramazan, whom the artist held in high esteem. A tenet of Sufism is the belief that the essence of truth is devoid of all form, yet inseparable from all forms, material or spiritual.  Such a notion is inherent in Tutto where a꧒n apparent abstraction is constructed of individual figurative parts.

In Boetti's other works, such as Maps of the World, or The Longest River in the World, the representation of reality is linked to a precise historical moment or geographical location. Tutto, however, represents the universal and the ubiquitous – an omniscient expression of continuous conception. As such, we can consider this work, conceived toward the end of his life, as a reflection of the world, a visual representation of pure artistic creation. As Shirazeh Houshiary has said, "If you could reach this small, minute, moment of now, it would contain all, from the beginning to the end of time; as if to say that it is the smallest part and yet the largest. Boetti reached the same conclusions; and even if a lifetime is not long enough to fully comprehend, I feel that he died too early. There was so much for him to do, but somehow maybe he saw it at the end of his life... The whole of humanity can be seen as a tiny drop that becomes one with the ocean.  Perhaps he saw it as a whole. I feel that he did." (cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Alighiero e Boetti, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1999, p. 73)