Mario Merz

Mario Merz created sculptures, paintings, photographs, and even videos and was one of the first contemporary artists to develop installation art in the 1960s. He did not believe in distinctions between nature and culture and moved experimentally from one technique to another. His works use a variety of everyday materials and motifs—ranging from metal rods to glass fragments, from fresh fruit to bundles of branches, from piles of newspapers to neon tubes, and from words to numbers.

In 1971, he began a series of interventions with numbers made out of neon and arranged in the interiors or on the exteriors of buildings. Because of its flexibility, neon allowed the artist to present a rapid and immediate shorthand writing of a number. Manica lunga da 1 a 987 (Manica Lunga from 1 to 987), 1990, belongs to this body of works. The sixteen first numbers of the Fibonacci series, in blue neon, are placed on the brick exterior of Castello di Rivoli’s Manica Lunga wing, in proximity to the sixteen large windows punctuating the long structure. Already used as an art gallery by the Savoy family in the seventeenth century, the building is brought up to date in an encounter between past and present, in which the window—a boundary between interior and exterior—takes on a primary value of relationship and interpenetration.