Mario Merz

Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the mid 1990s

Germano Celant, Mario Merz, in: Artforum, January 2004, p. 25, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: this work is in good and working condition.
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An elegant profusion of light, Teatro Cavallo executed in 1966, is from the very earliest works produced by Merz to incorporate neon.  Formally and symbolically replete with metaphorical associations, neon exercises a pivotal function within the artist's esoteric oeuvre in effecting homogeneity between the disparate strands of Merz's practice.  Belonging to a small series of works focussed on the same theme – one of which was exhibited in Merz's major 1989 Guggenheim retrospective curated by Germano Celant – this luminescent structure represents a remarkably early and rare conflation of two exemplary elements within the artist's production: the symbolic significance of primordial animals, and light as evocative of pure energy.  A minimal suggestion of line and form removed from the praxis of painting, Teatro Cavallo significantly breaches the boundary between the plasticity and spatiality of artistic creation.  As Celant has remarked: "Teatro Cavallo thus unhooks the work from the wall and defines an independent space that has removed the canvas, hence the genre of painting, from the jutting structure, and that tries to put greater emphasis on the encounter of figures of neon light." (Germano Celant, 'The Organic Flow of Art' in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mario Merz, 1989, p.22). 

 

A creator of projecting structures, paintings, and immersive ensembles that typically comprise Igloos, spiral tables, sequences of numbers, and bunches of twigs, Merz extensively utilises neon to formally and symbolically articulate ideological connections between ostensibly disparate objects.  Light acts as a direct representation of the transmission of energy from one element to the next, tracing the trajectory of the organic to the inorganic through a juxtaposition of elemental materials.  Collectively exhibited within Merz's first solo exhibition in 1968, the early and experimental series of neon works, to which Teatro Cavallo belongs, predominantly feature inanimate objects such as bottles, umbrellas, and raincoats, pierced by a spear of neon light.  According to Merz, the use of neon entailed "creating a sculpture that was not fixed, that was not geometrical – a construction that would be a transformation rather than a construction." (the artist cited in: Ibid., p.105). Within these sculptural ensembles, neon acts as a "thunderbolt" or flow of energy in functioning to conceptually destabilize and destroy the very idea of that object (Ibid., p. 104).  However, where the spectacle of these works centres on a transferral of energy via an impalement of banal items, the focus of Teatro Cavallo resides in the solitary drama of pure neon. 

 

A leading figure within the Arte Povera movement, Mario Merz is celebrated for his esoteric works in which abstract concepts are conflated with elementary materials to produce multifaceted thought-systems.  Renown for basing much of his work on the complex but universal Fibonacci principle – the mathematical sequence inherent within natural laws of design, discovered in the thirteenth-century by the eponymous Italian mathematician – Merz combines a fascination with rational thought, materials, and the metaphorical qualities of natural objects, to question and unravel metaphysical truths.  Neon Fibonacci sequences are habitually present on the hemispheres of Merz's Igloos, within architectural structures, or juxtaposed against animals with primordial associations.  For Merz the symbology of this abstract sequence articulated in neon, bears witness to the continuous development of the world dependent upon past tradition.  Pre-dating Merz's revelatory application of this mathematical principle, Teatro Cavallo stands out as a prototypical expression of this inquiry through invoking the figurative suggestion of a horse. 

 

A traditionally symbolic animal with particular affiliations to man, the taming of the wild horse represents a major development in the history of human civilization.  Dating back to the very first evidence of artistic expression found in the caves at Lascaux, the horse is art-historically rich in associations.  From the antique equestrian monument of Marcus Aurelius, to the early twentieth-century transmutation of horse and rider statuary by Marino Marini, the horse and art, moreover the horse within Italian art, share a long lineage.  Indeed, by pairing down a suggestion of equine embodiment to a minimalistic neon-symbol, Merz builds on Marini's evocation of the horse as mythical entity.  Anciently conflated "with the sun and the waters", the horse articulates an embodiment of creation, inspiration, and movement. (Marino Marini Catalogue p.182).  Thus, this work not only foreshadows Merz's use of prehistoric animals for their semblance to man's ancestral past, but also represents an early intimation of the centrality of light as a source of elemental energy key to Merz's practice.     

 

Unique to Merz's oeuvre, Teatro Cavallo stands apart for its exclusive focus on light as the predominant object.  The subject of this work is distilled to a supporting structure of black metal scaffold upon which a length of neon rests while a separate curved bulb is suspended on the wall.   In this exclusivity to neon, Merz underscores the influence of Lucio Fontana, who in 1951 pioneered its earliest use at the ninth Milan triennale.  Akin to his canvas incisions, Fontana's neon spatial environment employed the fluctuating substance of light to locate a new means of artistic gesture in physical or real space.  Similarly, Merz harnesses light for creative expression.  By focussing on the the viewer's encounter with neon, Merz imbues the artwork with a sense of reality via luminous electricity as raw energy.  In contrast to Bruce Nauman's contemporaneous use of neon, whose slogans evidence an absorption of advertising and consumer culture; or Dan Flavin's autonomous use of light as technological totems; neon in Merz's work represents an allusion to elementary creation.  Thus, in line with the central tenet of Arte Povera, Merz's incorporation of light stems from an artistic will to insert "something pertaining to life in art" (Lucas Fragrasso, 'Mario Merz and the Critical Nature of the New Avant-Garde', in: Exhibition Catalogue, Buenos Aires, Fundación Proa, Mario Merz: Historical Works – Installations, 2002, p.80).  Where the capturing of light's effects was once the objective for an aesthetic translation of reality in paint, light in Teatro Cavallo is not a representation of reality, but embodies reality itself. 

 

A work of great intellectual intensity, symbolic resonance, and art historical richness, Teatro Cavallo is remarkable for its formative allusion to the meta-themes of Merz's greater artistic production.  Constituting the only evocation of the horse in Merz's career (choosing the focus predominantly on the ahistoricism of reptiles in his later work), and the singular work in which the animal form is solely articulated in neon, Teatro Cavallo is wholly unique in its eloquent luminescence.  An extraordinary and rare entity within Merz's oeuvre, this wonderfully multivalent work marks a triumph of Arte Povera in its true exploitation of the materiality and symbolic potential of neon, to evoke the very essence of life as the subject of art.