Uno dei tre quadri muti senza scrittura 1988

Alighiero Boetti made this print, "One of three silent paintings without writing" using several printing processes, the overlap of processes being very visible in the final artwork. The layering of colour and shape here reminds me of my own approach to painting - of building up paintings through the accumulation of marks and gestures. Look closely, and you’ll see the crisp edges of stencils, the soft bleeding of spray paint, and some fine lines in pencil perhaps. In the centre, there’s this cluster of bright red marks – like some kind of strange, alien seed pod. The texture is both flat and spatial, the piece a kind of layered map, or constellation. Boetti often engaged with systems and chance in his work, just as John Cage did with his compositions, the final image is a record of process and experimentation. Nothing is fixed, and everything is open to interpretation, a silent painting asking to be read.