Mario Merz

Untitled

1971

Courtesy :

September 1967 saw the inauguration at the Galleria La Bertesca of Genoa of the exhibition  Arte Povera curated by Germano Celant, who gave the movement of this name its theoretical definition. The choice of this term recalls the language used by the theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, who back in the early Sixties had proposed the establishment of a “poor theatre”: the big shows based on theatrical make-believe should give way to the exclusive relationship between actor and spectator, thus retrieving the cathartic function of the rite. The artists of the Arte Povera movement followed the same line of aesthetic thought; their works did away with the fiction of representation in order to present themselves tautologically as elements subject to the forces of nature, the passing of time, the finiteness of contingency. Images exist at a  pre-iconographical level: there are no symbolic references or semantic ambiguities, objects are invested with their primary meaning of existence. The present is the sole reality to be dominated, with a militant attitude of criticism to the system.
Mario Merz embodied this line of thought, offering the spectator a changing, indefinite universe in which all scientific certainty of progress was lacking. His use of the Fibonacci series began in 1969: this was a sequence, invented by the mediaeval mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. The order of nature does not take shape in the logical concept of progress or in the measurement of fixed data: Fibonacci’s sequence is changing and infinite.
 

Milano 1925 | Milano 2003
September 1967 saw the inauguration at the Galleria La Bertesca of Genoa of the exhibition Arte Povera curated by Germano Celant, who gave the movement of this name its ...
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