Marina Merz seen through her poetry

About the exhibition “Marisa Merz – Ascoltare lo spazio / Listen to space”, visible until September 22 at the LaM in Villeneuve-d’Ascq.

She never sought to create a work. Marisa Merz was an artist as she was alive. Considered today as the only woman of arte povera, this Italian artistic movement that makes do with the most humble materials and which was theorized by her husband Mario Merz, she was also reduced for a long time to the status of the maestro's wife. Which did not prevent her, as soon as in 1967 she made her mark by using her Turin apartment to exhibit, for example, her kitchen hood, from forging a singular, radically free and personal work. Without ever archiving anything. Only her poems say a lot. The challenge was therefore considerable for the LaM in Villeneuve-d'Ascq when it came to concocting the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to her since her death in 2019, at the age of 93. But if we are to believe the article by Emmanuelle Lequeux published in the summer issue of Beaux Arts Magazine, evoking “an exhibition full of subtleties and revelations”, this challenge has been met in style. With “Marisa Merz – Ascoltare lo spazio / Ecouter l’espace”, visible until September 22, Andrea Viliani and Sébastien Delot have orchestrated, not an exhibition on Marisa Merz, but an exhibition by Marisa Merz. Including by presenting new works.

Because be careful, the Italian artist was not the type to develop hanging plans before arriving in an exhibition space with all her works of art stacked in a truck! She wanted to see on site. Feel on site. We can easily imagine the cold sweats of the art galleries and museums… But also those of the curators of this retrospective constructed for the first time without the artist’s intuition. “Marisa was always in a process of recreation between exhibitions, her works had no titles and she made them evolve like living matter,” says Andrea Viliani. “We listen to space. Time. Light.” The two curators therefore tried to get into Marisa’s head… To recompose things that she spent her time decomposing. They had to dare. They did well to dare.

Zoom out. “Marisa Merz was born in 1926 in Turin, where she frequented a cultural environment characterized by experimentation from adolescence, until the first presentation of her Living Sculptures – works made of aluminum sheets – in 1967 in her own home, and at the Gian Enzo Sperone art gallery, in the same city. Often presented as the only woman in the Arte Povera group, Marisa Merz masters certain codes and issues – the interest in raw materials, the relationship between sculpture and space, and between art and life – without being completely part of it. By developing a substantially autonomous position, she produced a resolutely open body of work for over fifty years.

In her studio, Marisa Merz transformed space and time into a large collage, navigating between numerous references, images and expressions from the history of art, but also everyday objects and materials of a great variety: from aluminum to clay, from copper to nylon, from wax to fabric. A radically personal expressive repertoire in which high and popular culture, art materials and everyday objects merge to form a work that is at once intimate and astonishing, of a strange power.

Marisa Merz worked in series but created ephemeral works, in continuous transformation, constantly returning to the same motifs, the same materials, the same techniques, to truly approach their essence. She explores her subjects through subtle and constant variations, from one work to another, playing with scales, shapes, materials, colors and surface effects. The many faces she modeled, in wax, clay or plaster, covered with pigments, gold leaf and copper frames, or drawn constantly, on all types of supports – from the wooden board to the sheet of paper – have for this reason the same dynamic uncertainty and the same power of attraction as those of the artists Medardo Rosso or Amedeo Modigliani. Aware that painting is a language with a memory, she was able to trace this history, which extends from Byzantine icons to the most radical religious paintings, by Fra Angelico or Antonello da Messina, nevertheless tracing a history that belongs only to her.

The least we can say is that Marisa Merz did not have the goal of selling works of art… Or even of gaining any recognition for that matter. “She works with gold as well as memory, wax as well as clay. But above all, the present moment,” writes Emmanuelle Lequeux. Recalling that one of the principles of arte povera consisted precisely for contemporary artists of this time in no longer making works of art, but in feeling free “to lead a guerrilla war of freedom against the destiny of the work of art to be an object,” as noted by Germano Celant, the first theoretician of the movement. Marisa Merz also had nothing to do with chronology. Just to find the trace of her first participation in an arte povera exhibition in 1968, “it was necessary to solve a whole puzzle of disparate information,” says Emmanuelle Lequeux.

I won’t tell you about the countless misunderstandings that her way of working has always generated in the reception of Marina Merz’s work! In a very American reading, for example, she was considered a feminist, while she made her honey from her domestic life as a mother. Elsewhere, she was rightly criticized for her lack of commitment. She didn’t care, Marisa. She did what she wanted, how she wanted. And if the LaM exhibition is so enjoyable today, it is undoubtedly because, ultimately, it is through her poetry that the curators found the most instructions for mounting her work…

Article written by Valibri en Roulotte