Boetti's biro series,
begun in 1972 and continued through the 1980s, encompassed many of the ideas
that were most important to the artist: collaboration, order and disorder,
coded language, wordplay, double meanings and cerebral engagement. The biro works
were executed with standard, inexpensive ballpoint pens (perhaps a nod to
Boetti's roots in the Arte
Povera movement) by assistants instructed to take turns making rows
of meticulous hatch marks, filling large sheets of paper, with the exclusion of
letters and symbols that were left as exposed white ground.

Boetti’s Giocare, 1978, is rendered in undulating hatch marks of velvety black ink with its title, meaning ‘to play’ – perhaps the most important aspect of this cerebral artist’s work – exposed along the upper edge.