The work of Mario Merz is rarely exhibited in America, and rarer still in any depth. His current reputation—like that of arte povera generally—is founded mostly on reproductions and myths, and like any sculptor, especially one with such a nuanced and lyric sense of materials, Merz loses almost everything in visual translation. This exhibition happily remedies the situation: It covers nearly two decades of his career and includes works in a variety of media, including large-scale constructions like Tavola a spirale (Spiral Table), 1982, laden with fruit and vegetables; an untitled oil painting incorporating snail shells and leaves; and a neon piece enumerating the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence. What emerges throughout is visual poetry of a refined and very European type. Merz uses found and often organic materials—beeswax, cauliflower, conch shells—as a traditional painter might, creating relationships of texture and color and tone (the grainy red and purple pigment against the beeswax surface of Quattro tavole in forma di foglie di magnolia [Four Tables in the Shape of Magnolia Leaves], 1985, for example). Most impressive, though, is the depth and coherence of this artist’s sensibility. Individual works or moments that might initially appear hackneyed or mannered—as in the leaflike sculpted forms in Pianissimo (Very slowly, very quietly), 1984—instead seem natural when considered as aspects of Merz’s utopian-anthropological aspirations: They speak to the fact that in his hands art is neither a style game nor an arena for virtuoso display, but rather an assertion (however tentative) of a kind of wisdom, at once cosmic and everyday.
