Mario Merz

Il volo dei numeri | 2000

Fibonacci’s idea was the idea of a number series that had a proliferating meaning and not a purely mathematical meaning.

Mario Merz

Mario Merz’s Il volo dei numeri (The Flight of Numbers) consists of a neon reproduction of the first sixteen numbers of the Fibonacci series, the mathematical sequence identified by Abbot Leonardo of Pisa in 1202 and which mathematicians and scientists have since verified to be a recurring pattern in nature. Its geometric transposition, which governs the development of various animal and plant life forms, gave rise to the golden ratio, which has fascinated artists and intellectuals throughout the centuries.

The atavistic marriage of nature and culture, embodied in this series of figures, reflects the poetics of Mario Merz, who placed industrial materials alongside natural ones such as fruit, bundles or wax in his works, often entrusting the luminous energy of neon with the expression of an idea of the continuous transformation of reality, crossed by a vital flow of physical and imaginative charges.

Il volo dei numeri was created and donated by the artist to the City of Turin on the occasion of the coerenza in coerenza exhibition held at the Mole Antonelliana in 1984, and since 2000 it has been part of the Luci d’Artista event.

One of the most internationally recognised Italian artists, Mario Merz (Milan, 1925-2003) participated in the Arte Povera movement and is particularly known to the general public for his Igloos, to which a major retrospective was dedicated at the Hangar Bicocca in Milan in 2018-2019. The political sensibility that had already prompted him, in his early twenties, to join the anti-fascist group Giustizia e libertà and thus be arrested, underlies some of his most famous works such as l’Igloo di Giap (Giap’s Igloo) (1968), which bears the neon inscription of a quotation from the Vietnamese general. There is no lack of painting in his career, to which he owes his debut and which he has continued to practise in an environmental and installation style. Merz has received numerous awards, the last of which was the Praemium Imperiale for Painting in Tokyo in 2003.