Mario Merz. The number is a living animal

Mario Merz (1925-2003) is one of the undisputed protagonists of the 20th century art history and perhaps the most emblematic figure of Arte Povera which, born in Turin between the 1960s and 1970s as an antithetical position to other trends, such as American Pop and the social values connected to it, was (together with the Transavanguardia then yet to come) one of the last Italian artistic movements to have an international weight. As demonstrated by the major exhibition inaugurated last October at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, not only was this movement very well known, but also the influence that the works of its protagonists (Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio) was and is influential for the younger generations[1]. The revolutionary aspect of these artists resided in the unconventional and non-dogmatic attitude that led them to undermine the distinction between genres to create the first “installations” in the art history, in which painting, sculpture, drawing and photography could coexist symbiotically, as well as performative actions. Made with simple materials, often taken from the everyday or natural sphere (such as earth, lettuce, water, coal, trees, glasses, living bodies of animals and human beings) or from the world of work (such as stainless steel sheets, lead ingots, light bulbs, wooden beams, neon tubes), they proposed themselves as devices activating energy exchanges that started from the matter to be transmitted emotionally to the spectators.

Mario Merz, “Le case girano intorno a noi o noi giriamo intorno alle case?”, 1999, metal structures, collages on folex, stones, neon. Collezione Merz, photo © Giuseppe Marinelli / Giovanni Peretti. Copyright © MARIO MERZ, by SIAE 2024

Merz’s legacy, like that of all authors of absolute value who have marked an era, is a heritage to be kept alive so that his contribution is not reduced to a consolidated formula, destined to be emptied over time if it is not constantly corroborated by new studies and new points of view. And it is precisely to the intent of rereading the master’s work, highlighting its pressing topicality, that the precious exhibition underway in Verona at the Achille Forti Gallery of Modern Art responds, an internal production implemented in synergy with the Merz Foundation in Turin and with Rocca Albornoz – Museo nazionale del Ducato di Spoleto for the imminent centenary of the master’s birth. The careful selection of the works on display, carried out by the curators with the scientific support of the Merz Foundation, was guided by the (successful) intent of synthesizing the most representative elements of the artist’s complex poetics in function of the exhibition space and of making works created in different periods and with different media dialogue with each other in order to reinterpret them through the lens of contemporary critical reflection. The project is part of a wide-ranging program, to which Giulio Paolini’s exhibition from last year also belongs, which Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti has been carrying out for some years in concert with ArtVerona, to delve into a specific research line born in Italy with Lucio Fontana in the 1940s, then exploded in a clear way in the 1960s, which aimed to transform the spectator from a user to an active agent of the work.

Mario Merz, “La natura è l’equilibrio della spirale”, 1976, mixed media on canvas; “Untitled”, 2002, newspapers, glass, neon. Collezione Merz, Torino photo © Giuseppe Marinelli / Giovanni Peretti, Copyright © MARIO MERZ, by SIAE 2024

The generative fulcrum of Mario Merz’s Verona exhibition could only be one of his iconic igloos, installation structures, usually made of self-supporting iron tubes, which appear in an infinite series of variations in his production starting from 1968, the year in which he created the igloo Object chache-toi. In antithesis to the obvious temptation to assimilate them to living spaces, for Merz these micro-habitats, despite following the most archaic form of living, have no functional or architectural value, but are conceived as mental spaces of freedom where one can think without hierarchies and build a more conscious relationship with nature through the generative elements of his art (added to the igloos from time to time) such as numerical or verbal neon lines, drawings, everyday objects or bundles of brushwood. The igloo on display (Le case girano intorno a noi o noi giriamo intorno alle case?, / Do houses revolve around us or do we revolve around houses?, 1999) is presented as an open structure, whose permeability between inside and outside is a paradigmatic expression of the artist’s conception of society as one of collectivity and exchange, a hymn to freedom by someone who used to say that «the worst evil in the world is the wall». Full enjoyment of the work requires walking around it, to read the words that make up the title on a series of neon lights connected by electric cables and placed on irregular slate plates, a natural material that recurs in his works from the 1990s. If we are barred from entering, the igloo is crossed by large two-dimensional black silhouettes of primordial animals drawn on luminous acetate panels, in a procession that also involves the rest of the exhibition space. The animals, energetic elements associated with the natural proliferation of life, appearing as drawings, are here also an expression of that anti-hierarchical intersection between three-dimensional volumetry and two-dimensionality that is one of the salient features of the artist’s poetics.

The other large installation in the exhibition combines the painting La natura è l’equilibrio della spirale / Nature is the equilibrium of the spiral (1976) and the sculpture Untitled (2002) made of newspapers, glass and neon. In the first, a rough canvas hosts the equally iconic Fibonacci numerical progression, absorbed early in the artist’s research as a code of organic growth underlying appearances, and the element of the spiral embodied by the snail’s shell, a further manifestation of the mathematical proliferation that governs nature and the universe. To underline the interdependence of the themes of geometry, time, nature and regenerating energy raised to absolute values, in the second work the numerical sequence appears associated with glass fragments and piles of old newspapers (objects by their nature obsolete immediately after their production) that refer to the geological concept of time stratification. These last two elements, moreover, introduce Mario Merz’s close connection with the art history, being directly attributable both to the multifaceted vision proposed by Cubism and to the recovery of Dadaist ancestry of the waste of life in art. It is interesting to observe, again from the perspective of a constant reflection on the artistic languages preceding him, also the beautiful drawings on display, almost all dated 1978, where it is evident how the reworking of the contributions of the twentieth-century avant-gardes (such as the immediacy of the expressionist sign, the linear dynamism of futurism and the energetic chromatic emanation of abstract art) is perfectly integrated into the specificities of his revolutionary language, rooted in the forms of nature and oriented towards a substantial three-dimensionality of painting.

[1] In the Parisian exhibition, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the works of the thirteen artists of the group are exhibited alongside works by an equal number of artists whose practice constitutes a resonance form with Arte Povera, such as David Hammons, William Kentridge, Jimmie Durham, Anna Boghiguian in the 1980s, Pierre Huyghe, Grazia Toderi, Adrián Villar Rojas in the 1990s, Mario Garcia Torres, Renato Leotta, Agnieszka Kurant, Otobong Nkanga, Theaster Gates and D Harding in the 2000s.

Info:

Mario Merz. Il numero è un animale vivente
11/10/2024 – 30/03/2025
curated by Patrizia Nuzzo and Stefano Raimondi
Palazzo della Ragione
Cortile Del Mercato Vecchio, 10 – 37121 Verona
www.gam.comune.verona.it

Emanuela Zanon

Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.

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