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The mourning glory that followed the death of Mario Merz last November reached London with this two-part elegiac exhibition, in two very different locations. The nine pieces on display spanned some 34 years, from Merz’s first uses of neon, his signature material, to later works that marked a return to painting and drawing.

The grandeur of the space at the Italian Cultural Institute occasionally undermines the works on display, but Merz was more than able to hold his own here. Particularly effective was his Fibonacci Series (1966), which was given an elegant architectural framing by the frieze above it and the Murano glass chandelier opposite. The series, devised in the thirteenth century to calculate the breeding pattern of rabbits, and thus redolent of biological growth and proliferation, is based on the simple premise that each number should be the sum of the two that precede it: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 etc. Merz adopted this principle, while recognising that every progression is indebted to that which preceded it. This is also borne out by Impermeabile (1966), which features a jacket pierced and penetrated by neon tubes that imbue it with energy. Acting as a reminder of the lessons learned from Lucio Fontana’s investigations onto the spatial properties of slashed canvases and Dan Flavin’s Minimalist adoption of neon lights, this work predates Merz’s inclusion into the Arte Povera group in 1967. These early works were less aesthetic but more energetic than the later ones, which predominate here.





A recent issue of Flash Art Italia devoted many pages to a valediction of Merz. The works, especially one of his last pieces installed at the Forum in Rome in April 2003, where his neon lights coiled around the ancient columns, looked luminously beautiful. Thirty-seven years earlier, Germano Celant published his manifesto Arte Povera: appunti per una guerriglia [Arte Povera: Notes for a guerrilla warfare] in the then newly-founded Flash Art. This was when art could still appropriate the language of guerrilla warfare, and no other member of the nascent Arte Povera group did this more so than Merz. A more radical and politicised artist than is widely recognised today, Merz was an active member of the anti-fascist group Giustizia e Libertà, which led to his arrest and imprisonment. The ubiquity of his igloos, absent from this exhibition but present in museums around the world, has sublimated their political beginnings in the late 1960s, when they and other works were often inscribed with revolutionary slogans, ranging from graffiti scrawled on the streets of Paris during the riots of May ’68, such as ‘Solitario solidale’ [Solitary Solidarity] to quotes from Lenin and General Giap in Vietnam.

By the late 1970s, when the Transavanguardia group, an upstart rival to Arte Povera, emerged in Italy, championed by Achille Bonita Olivia and artists such as Paladino, Cucchi and Clemente, Merz returned to painting – a transition well-represented by works such as La Natura Interloquisce (1977). Merz retained his singular aesthetic, perforating the canvas with a coiling neon tube, and scrawling the Fibonacci sequence across it. The canvas, roughly tacked onto the wall and frayed at the edges, has more in common with the French Support-Surface group than his Italian counterparts’ wholesale return to the easel. Chiocciola [Snail] (1974) is one of the quieter works in this ensemble, consisting of a spiral drawn in clay on paper, with the addition of a real shell in the centre. The spiral, another of Merz’s obsessions, unfurls towards infinity like the Fibonacci sequence. A sense of humour is detected in the tautological Panno da Biliardo [Pool Cloth] (1992), a green, felt cloth tacked onto a stretcher, upon which Merz paints a pool table, complete with Jackson Pollock expressionistic drips and Futurist lines of movements to depict the motion of the balls. By now distanced from the legacy of Arte Povera, the memory of it still lingers in the humble materials employed.

The works at Westlondonprojects were fewer in number, but larger in ambition and scale. I Giganti Boscaiuoli [Giant Woodcutters] (1981-2) is a large-scale canvas tacked onto the wall and embellished with a jewel-like neon tube, testifying that Merz’s paintings could absorb his more sculptural activities. The real show-stopper came at the end, however. La Bottiglia di Leyda [Leyda’s Bottle] (1979) took over an entire room, covering each wall, floor to ceiling, in wire net, branches and neon. Here, a neon Fibonacci progression of numbers erupted from the natural form of the wooden twigs, bathing the room in its blue light, while elsewhere a green wine bottle was penetrated by another neon tube.

The exhibition blurb was keen to point out Merz’s continuing relevance and influence on subsequent generations of artists, including Tracey Emin (scrawled neon slogans) and Damien Hirst (taxidermy). The influence is more convincingly borne out by Tacita Dean’s eponymous film Mario Merz (2002) and Anya Gallaccio’s rotting apples, which Merz first employed almost 30 years ago. One of the phrases that Merz applied most in his neon works, ‘Se la forma scompare, la sua radice é eterna’ [If the form disappears, its root will be eternal] seems strangely prescient now.

Nicholas Cullinan

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