Ghise (Boetti)

Ghise (Boetti) is a cast of a piece of corrugated cardboard on which the artist etched his signature. The two sheets retain both the positive and negative imprint of his signature.
The duality of the work is an early account of Boetti’s investigation of the identity of the artist as inherently double. Such attitude would lead to the addition of an “e” (Italian for “and”) between the artist’s first and last names in 1972. Based on the inversion and mirroring of the signature, Ghise visualizes the double by the overlapping of opposing poles that can coincide only in making art. The process of casting itself is based on the inversion of a negative into a positive. At the same time, the handwritten signature is a word and can be viewed as an artistic image. The interplay between drawing and writing recurs often in Boetti’s art.