Mario Merz: The expression of the living world

With reference some of his most emblematic works, borrowed from many private collections in Greece by the curator Paolo Colombo, the exhibition introduces to the public the variegated creations of, who always excelled in inspiration, ideas and originality since his first appearance as a painter in 1954 and continued throughout the revolutionary experience of Arte Povera and culminated in his famous ‘Fibonacci’ works .

Merz himself was a passionate man, feeling totally absorbed to the things he undertook, studied and created. His whole theory of life, his personal “Weltanshaung”, both in the theoretical and practical plane, was concerned in the meaning of the expression of form, in which he had chosen to invest the things of the world around him. Because, Mario Merze’s primal preoccupation was to produce a vibrant and profound vision of the reality. Towards art, he always maintained the candid eye of a self-made man—he was initially studying medicine when he dropped out to join the Resistance forces during the WWII—and the verve of an ‘apasionado’.

Thus his interests were not merely focused on the artistic issues, nor his creations were purely formalistic representations of a personal approach. On the contrary, Merze’s eye was drawn towards the expression of the human’s inner need to communicate his mind and the craving of shaping his destiny. His credo was that man conceives the World both through the senses and the practical transformation of his ‘habitat’. This view was vociferously depicted in the works of the first period, with the nightmarish and ferocious animals, the Arte Povera phase (during which were ‘resurrected’ useless materials and tools to a new and ‘functional’ form, like his ‘Simca 100’ and his ‘motorcycles’) and, mostly, in the ‘Igloo’ phase. This phase was marked by a series of groundbreaking creations, where the cosmic element was fused with the human ‘habitat’. The dome of the igloo house was seen as a metaphor, or a reduction to a human scale, of the dome of the universe—to the same scale the word ‘space’ expresses both an area and the vastness of the infinite. At the same time, this humble igloo construction is seen as the refuge of men against the hardships of an insidious environment, which provides warmth and pure satisfaction, as Immanuel Kant defines it like another aspect of the ‘Sublime’, the junction of awesomeness and relief.

His everlasting interest in science and his belief that artistic sense and scientific spirit possesses the same characteristics—as the quest of harmony in the law-like shaping and representation of the word, and as a continuous path of consequent discoveries and additions of improvements-were expressed in the internationally acclaimed series of works inspired by the famous sequences of the Medieval mathematician Fibonacci (in which each number is equal with the sum of the previous two).

In the works of Mario Merz everything is linked and nothing acts separately; politics, science, ethics, language, art and all the images they produce and ‘hunt’ the human experience and existence, are real things in life, an ontological view of the mental representations of men and their practical materialization, to only one scope: to make life and earth, the human existence in general, a hospitable place for the bearers of the high values that not only art and science, but man himself as a creative agent gives to his life.

The exhibition will run from October 22, 2015 to January 31, 2016.

George –Byron Davos