Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994)

‘One of the most obvious mistakes of our culture is the divisions it makes in the oneness and wholeness of the world with rigid classifcations: like the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdom and so on. It’s a mental category, a separation, which I feel obscures and veils all possibility of understanding things. In its pretence to explain, it only serves to nullify a broad scope of understanding things... We then need to perceive this oneness in things, instead of always dividing them into categories and classifcations, and above all antitheses of the good/bad, black/white kind’ (A. Boetti, quoted in ‘Today to Tomorrow,’ 1988, Alighiero e Boetti: Bringing the World into Art 1993-1962, exh. cat., MADRE, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, 2009, p. 209)