Artist: Alighiero Boetti

Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong presents Alighiero e Boetti: Ononimo, an exhibition exploring the artist’s enduring fascination with systems, collaboration, and variation. Bringing together works from Boetti’s celebrated Biro and Aerei series, the exhibition traces his investigation into how order and repetition give rise to difference, and how meaning emerges through collective labour, time, and chance.

The exhibition’s title, Ononimo – borrowed from Boetti’s 1973 work – derives from a neologism he coined by merging the Italian anonimo (anonymous) and omonimo (homonymous). First written in blue biro in 1971 as a self-reflexive expression, it reflects Boetti’s preoccupation with duality and the splitting of identity, a principle he formalised that same year by inserting an “and” between his names to become “Alighiero e Boetti.”

In 1972, as he would later do with the embroidered Arazzi, Boetti devised a system of delegation, instructing assistants in Rome to fill sheets of paper with dense fields of biro ink leaving only cryptic letters and symbols exposed. The origins of these works lie in his earlier experiments in repetitive mark-making, such as the now-lost La Luna (1968). From these gestures of rote drawing emerged the Biro series: vast compositions governed by codes, alphabets, and linguistic puzzles.

Each Biro drawing requires the viewer to uncover a hidden word or phrase governed by its own internal logic. Some spell out sentences through alphabets and commas read across or down the surface; others form anagrams to be mentally reconstructed, recalling a child learning to sound out words. At their core, the Biro works are meditations on repetition and variation. Each follows a rule – filling every square with ink, stroke by stroke – yet because no two hands move alike, no two marks are identical. The surface builds through repetition, but it is difference that accumulates: in density, rhythm, and time. Boetti designed the systems but entrusted their execution to others, whose unique gestures introduced individuality. Meaning, for Boetti, arose not from fixed identities but from relationships – between letters, colours, and the people who enacted them.

While the Biro drawings articulate this logic through language and code, the Aerei series translates it into image and motion. In both, Boetti devised frameworks that others would realise, allowing individuality to emerge within constraint. Whether depicting a swarm of aircraft or exploring the hidden geometries of language, he sought to visualise systems of connection – between people, between signs, between the seen and the unseen.

In 1977, Boetti collaborated with architect Guido Fuga to produce a triptych of aeroplanes suspended in flight against an infinite sky – passenger jets, fighter planes, cargo aircraft, Concordes, and propeller-driven models. Executed through a process combining photographic templates, watercolour, and biro, the Aerei works are characterised by a permutational and disorienting structure, where chaos and order collide within a system that is paradoxically rational and classified.

Among the works in the exhibition, Ononimo (1973) stands as the largest and most ambitious Biro. Composed of eleven panels, only five works of this scale exist, one of which resides in the Municipal Museum of Art in Toyota, Japan. The title offers a self-portrait of distributed authorship – what Mirella Sauzeau called a “plural feast of the divided self.” The number eleven, Boetti’s favourite, doubles the unit “1”, mirroring his twinned identity as Alighiero e Boetti.

Aerei (1978–79), executed in black biro, extends this logic of multiplicity as Boetti shifted from linguistic to pictorial structures. Against a dazzling field of ink applied by assistants, white planes soar in sharp relief, the irregularities of the medium lending the surface a living pulse.

Il dolce far niente (1975) unfolds across four panels, a constellation of commas scattered across a black field, each corresponding to a letter in an alphabetic key running down the side. When read in sequence, they spell out the work’s title. Once part of sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro’s collection, the piece embodies Boetti’s belief that the Biro drawings were about “giving time to time” – the time taken to make them, and the time required for their slow deciphering by the viewer. In Insicuro noncurante (1983), a radiant red surface conceals a phrase pairing structurally similar but conceptually opposed words. Here, Boetti explores the distance between what is seen and what is meant, what is written and what is felt.

Playful, lucid, and conceptually resonant, the works in Ononimo move between intellect and emotion, order and freedom. They remind us that even the most exact systems cannot contain the vitality of human gesture. Structured yet tremulous with life, they affirm Boetti’s conviction that within repetition lies infinite variation – and that in every difference, the world remakes itself anew.