Exploring the opposing dualities of visibility and invisibility, mimicry and originality, uniqueness and mass-production, Alighiero Boetti’s Mimetico (Camouflage) appears as an ironical homage to the tradition of painting, one which retains an awareness of the radical shifts that were occurring in Italian art in the postwar period. The artwork takes an unaltered piece of found fabric as its primary material, a segment of Italian military-grade camouflage known as “Telo Mimetico (M29),” originally designed in 1929 for shelter-tents and subsequently adopted for troop uniforms during the Second World War. Featuring flowing organic shapes and variations on a green-yellow-brown colour palette, the fabric has the distinction of being the camouflage pattern longest in use internationally, only being discontinued in the early 1990s. Over the course of its life subtle shifts in shade and tone were manufactured, creating a pattern that appeared to be constantly evolving. In Mimetico, Boetti appropriates these distinctive colour combinations and amorphous patterns to create an artwork that simultaneously references and subverts the functional use of the material, and which examines the relationship between the painted image and reality.
Boetti had begun experimenting with the Telo Mimetico M29 material in 1966, exhibiting a horizontal camouflage ‘painting’ in his inaugural solo-show at the Galleria Christian Stein in Turin during the opening months of 1967. The invitation card for the exhibition opening acted as announcement of sorts for Boetti’s intentions, featuring small snippets of each of the common, everyday materials the artist would be incorporating in to the artworks on show. Each element was intrinsically linked to the industrialisation of northern Italy in the postwar period, with its scores of factories and manufacturing companies producing such products on a daily basis. In this first iteration of the Mimetico idea, the artist stretched the camouflage fabric onto canvas supports, filling the frame entirely with the ready-made material. By using this machine produced, prêt-a-porter material, Boetti slyly acknowledges and subverts the notion of the artist as the individual creator of the work of art, a concept that he would continue to question throughout the rest of his career. Although the pattern was easily recognisable, the absurdity of its repurposing in the context of the gallery granted it an immediate impact amongst the artworks exhibited.
Over the course of the following two years, Boetti continued to explore the multiple potentialities of camouflage, playing with different permutations and variations of the original concept. This coincided with a frenetically productive period for the artist as he became actively engaged with the Arte Povera movement. In the same year that the present work was created (1967), Germano Celant published his seminal article "Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla war", which proudly proclaimed the emergence of a new tendency within Italian art that would wage war against the constraints of tradition. Although Boetti’s work was often more playful and humorous than that of his contemporaries, his celebration of non-traditional materials aligned closely with the overarching sensibilities of this milieu. The present work adopts a smaller format than other examples from the series, drawing the eye into the very midst of the pattern, as the abstracted shapes merge and flow across the picture plane, filling it from corner to corner. Releasing the fabric from its usual functional role of disguising and concealing soldiers, Boetti presses his viewers right up against the pattern, drawing attention to the visual dynamism of the material itself, as the shapes appear to coalesce and move across the picture plane. In this way, the work appears to simultaneously reference and parody traditional abstract and gestural painting, challenging their hierarchical position in the history of twentieth-century art.
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Boetti had begun experimenting with the Telo Mimetico M29 material in 1966, exhibiting a horizontal camouflage ‘painting’ in his inaugural solo-show at the Galleria Christian Stein in Turin during the opening months of 1967. The invitation card for the exhibition opening acted as announcement of sorts for Boetti’s intentions, featuring small snippets of each of the common, everyday materials the artist would be incorporating in to the artworks on show. Each element was intrinsically linked to the industrialisation of northern Italy in the postwar period, with its scores of factories and manufacturing companies producing such products on a daily basis. In this first iteration of the Mimetico idea, the artist stretched the camouflage fabric onto canvas supports, filling the frame entirely with the ready-made material. By using this machine produced, prêt-a-porter material, Boetti slyly acknowledges and subverts the notion of the artist as the individual creator of the work of art, a concept that he would continue to question throughout the rest of his career. Although the pattern was easily recognisable, the absurdity of its repurposing in the context of the gallery granted it an immediate impact amongst the artworks exhibited.
Over the course of the following two years, Boetti continued to explore the multiple potentialities of camouflage, playing with different permutations and variations of the original concept. This coincided with a frenetically productive period for the artist as he became actively engaged with the Arte Povera movement. In the same year that the present work was created (1967), Germano Celant published his seminal article "Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla war", which proudly proclaimed the emergence of a new tendency within Italian art that would wage war against the constraints of tradition. Although Boetti’s work was often more playful and humorous than that of his contemporaries, his celebration of non-traditional materials aligned closely with the overarching sensibilities of this milieu. The present work adopts a smaller format than other examples from the series, drawing the eye into the very midst of the pattern, as the abstracted shapes merge and flow across the picture plane, filling it from corner to corner. Releasing the fabric from its usual functional role of disguising and concealing soldiers, Boetti presses his viewers right up against the pattern, drawing attention to the visual dynamism of the material itself, as the shapes appear to coalesce and move across the picture plane. In this way, the work appears to simultaneously reference and parody traditional abstract and gestural painting, challenging their hierarchical position in the history of twentieth-century art.
