Untitled

During the 1980s, Mario Merz created large-scale works on paper that blur the boundaries between painting and drawing. The animal imagery in Merz’s work forms a contemporary bestiary, imbued with symbolic meanings. In this drawing, the shape of the animal is cut out on black paper and attached to the translucent Folex. Numbers from the Fibonacci sequence appear in blue neon.
Light is a flow of vital energy for Merz. It spreads from inside to outside and from object to painting in a continuous metamorphosis. This metamorphosis is in turn linked to the Fibonacci sequence—a sequence in which each number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it. The series often refers to growth in nature. The numbers from the sequence that appear on the animal follow a circular path that traverses the animal and emanates energy onto it.