Curator, Ann Temkin: Alighiero Boetti was one of the great Italian artists who got his start in the movement called Arte Povera, or Poor Art. And in fact, a wonderful remark that Boetti made was, "Some of the best moments in Arte Povera were hardware shop moments." And this group of paintings really exemplifies that thought.
Boetti's hometown was Turin, which happened to be the headquarters of Fiat. So Boetti went to the hardware store and picked out a whole lot of car colors from the poetry of their names, that's what he loved. Names such as Oro Longchamp, Longchamp Gold, or Argento Auteuil, Auteuil Silver took their names from racecourses. Of course the car companies loved the idea that you would have the sense of racing cars as you were choosing what color you wanted.
What Boetti decided to do was make the painting, in fact, just be the name of that color. So these are car paint on squares of metal or of masonite, and then there are cork letters that spell out not only the name of the color, but its code number.
There's one diptych that Boetti made in this family of works. Rosso Gilera and Rosso Guzzi" refer to the two reds of the motorcycle companies, Guzzi and Gilera. These were two rival companies, and people in Italy at the middle of the century would have been very passionate about if you were a Gilera person or a Guzzi person. And Boetti makes fun of that rivalry, and actually celebrates, in a way, the passionate embrace of either motorcycle by painting one painting the red that was made for Gilera, and the other painting the red that was made for Guzzi, two slightly different reds. And so this diptych spells out the whole range of passions and history between these two motorcycle companies into squares of purchased color.”