Untitled

Mario Merz’s Untitled (1971) is a serene, resonant meditation on one of the artist’s favourite themes: the Fibonacci sequence. Discovered by the Italian mathematician Leonardo da Pisa in 1202, the sequence is a mathematical progression – where each number is the sum of the previous two, beginning 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on – that lies behind many patterns of growth and proliferation found in nature. Da Pisa found that it could be used to calculate the reproduction of rabbits; its proportions can also be seen in the human body – relating closely to the ‘golden’ or ‘divine’ ratio that fascinated Renaissance artists such as Botticelli and Leonardo – and in many natural materials that appear frequently in Merz’s work, such as leaves, pinecones, reptiles’ tails, deer antlers and seashells. The use of such unusual media was central to Merz’s Arte Povera practice, which proposed an almost prelapsarian vision of man in harmony with nature. He also made large public artworks in the form of the Fibonacci spiral, and ran Fibonacci numbers run down the sides of buildings. In Untitled, ten sheets of clear glass stand perpendicular to the wall in a long bed of soil. At the corner of each is its Fibonacci number, running from 1 to 55 in glowing blue neon: the physical distance between the panels increases in correlation with the advancing sequence. Merz juxtaposes nature and artifice by rooting these electrified windows in the raw organic matter of the earth, and makes visible, as if by magic, an order that structures the very world around us.

The Fibonacci sequence, as formalised by Merz into energising yet dimensionless neon light, is an organic force that speaks of a potential development into infinity. In its extension of space, it is also a metaphor for the progress of life. In works like Untitled, Merz saw the sequence as a way of ‘unloading’ or transforming an architectural setting. ‘A wall is a load (bricks, stones, lime, historical anxieties, psychological anxieties)’, he explained. ‘The numbers unload it the way music unloads the chemical density of the atmosphere. Music too has mathematical or numerical equivalences. Time is a tap root immersed in the ground (the date of birth). Time then develops in an objective and relatively free reality the way the tree develops from the tap root into the atmosphere’ (M. Merz, quoted in Mario Merz, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1989, p. 102). In this way, the presence of a sequence of neon numbers ‘growing’ along the wall notionally transforms the gallery space into an organically developing entity, like a tree, sunflower or nautilus shell: the work animates its environment with a mysterious, open-ended and luminous aura of possibility.