Mario Merz

Paris, Galerie Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert, Sculptures italiennes, 1984
Paris, Galerie Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert, Natures mortes, 1988
Paris, Galerie Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert, Mario Merz 1957-1987, 1990
Locminé/Bignan, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d’Art Contemporain, De la main à la tête, l’objet théorique, 1993, illustrated
Locminé/Bignan, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d’Art Contemporain, L’Ordre des Choses, 1993, illustrated
Paris, Galerie Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert, Arte Povera 1965-1972, 1995

Françoise Ducros, Mario Merz, Paris 1999, p. 41, illustrated in colour

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by the artist

Hailing from Turin, the cradle of Arte Povera, Mario Merz, is one of the group's preeminent figures and also the oldest... At the time of the movement's dawning, he already boasts a strongly affirmed pictorial practice, partly inspired by informal art. This experience will provide his work with a plastic diversity, improvisational speed and combinatorial aptitude that allow him to employ Arte Povera's concepts and forms in a most unique manner.

It is in 1969, for his legendary solo show Che Fare? (What's to be done?) at L’Attico gallery in Rome that Mario Merz uses materials such as glass, wood shavings and twigs, plaster, putty, wax and even his own car for the first time... The exhibition reveals the extraordinary development of his sculptural language. Shortly thereafter, he conducts some “actions” outdoors at Ivrea, close to the Olivetti factories. The process used consisted in extracting and casting the space between two branches by pouring liquid beeswax into a sheet and exhibiting it once dried and solid. These actions were photographed by Paolo Mussat Sartor. One of them bears a sub-title which enlightens us about the meaning of these works: "Una goccia di spazio", that's to say «A drop of space»…

On this occasion, Merz raises a question concerning the physical nature of empty space that he answers by means of a sculptural process which likens them to the «imprints», works one of whose origins can undoubtedly be traced back to Marcel Duchamp's Feuille de vigne femelle, realized in 1950. They belong to the sculptural explorations carried out in the sixties in which the exhibition space becomes an integral part of the work, conceived in close relation to the former, and in which the empty and the negative are treated with just as much attention as the full and the positive: Joseph Beuy's Fat corner (1960) or Chair with fat (1963) come to mind, as well as certain works by Bruce Nauman such as A cast of the space under my chair (1966-1968).

Senza Titolo (1969) consists of a cast in beeswax stemming from one of these actions, which are, in fact, few (we've only been able to account for four). It is presented on a “table”, composed of a glass triangle that rests in turn on two metallic trestles. Throughout the 60's, Merz, much like Beuys, made frequent use of wax, a primordial substance highly typical of the period's explorations in antiform. Its warm golden hue represents a specific touch of the color palette used by Merz in Che fare?, Sitin, Solidario Solidale (Solitary solidarity), Citta Irreale (Unreal city),  in 1968, as well as in important works such as Lingotto in 1969… It is a preeminently malleable organic substance that lends itself particularly well to Merz's demiurgic force: it is capable of following the artist's gesture and capturing the result with an altogether unique immediacy. The table functions instead as the picture plane, in continuity with the paintings from the fifties and early sixties. It plays an almost classical role of an alternative to the pedestal, acting as a kind of still-life display that foreshadows all the table-sculptures produced by Mario Merz afterwards, in direct correlation with the Fibonacci sequence. Triangular or spiral, they represent social, esthetic and architectural places: the geometric base which functions as a pedestal for the sculptural gesture becomes form, the matrix upon which all forms of creation express themselves...

By casting the negative space between the tree's forking branches, Merz focuses his attention on the point in which nature develops a specific source of vital energy as evidenced in the bamboo growth-knots, pine cones, and fern plants, used later in his work. He brings to light the sculptural value of all intervals: aren't the distances between the integers in the Fibonnaci sequence and their progression just as significant as the integers themselves (1,1,2,3,5,8,13…)?; the silence that follows a symphony is a part of that symphony; the space between manifest forms is an indivisible part of those forms: the universality of the law which sustains the growth of living forms integrates the space that separates them...

The landscape theme, the materialization of the void as a means of revealing a space that grows, the pregnancy of the substance and its origin, transform this natural «drop of space» into a "classic" of Arte Povera, an icon in which Merz ritualizes his pantheistic relation to nature.