Alighiero Boetti began his Biro series in 1972, a project in
which scores of assistants and students were commissioned to take turns
methodically filling sheets of white paper with rows of minute hatch
marks in ballpoint pen, leaving no white of the sheet exposed except for
the cryptic letters and symbols Boetti had allocated to be reserved as
negative space. These laborious collaborations resulted in sublime
monochromatic works with a variegated, vibrational quality, achieved by
the varying hands making the marks, and revealed the coded wordplay that
preoccupied Boetti in all of his work. Some of the biro works
can be deciphered by aligning letters of the alphabet with commas
scattered throughout the sheets while others contain a single word or
phrase spelled out at the top of the sheet.

Boetti's Ononimo,
1975, is rendered in undulating hatch marks of velvety black ink with
its title exposed along the upper edge. 'Ononimo', a word playfully
invented by Boetti that combines the Italian words anonimo (anonymous) and omonimo (homonymous),
referenced his radical notion that the authorship of a work of art is
not dependent on its physical production, underscoring that much of his
body of work was delegated to 'anonymous' artisans whom he never met;
though conversely, their roles in executing Boetti's ideas, whether with
the tapestries or Biros, are what give essence to his output. It
was the exploration of such novel ideas and practices that make Boetti
one of the most pioneering and influential conceptual artists of the
20th century.