The spiral is slow and full of humours like a fruit,
expressing the rising of matter over itself...
the cochlea expresses the primordial form,
the comma is the breath that says
we must breathe to write, we must breathe to draw.
Mario Merz

Twenty years after the great personal exhibition of Mario Merz at Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci of Prato, the space of Stazione Leopolda hosts the installation La spirale appare, a “total work”, as it was defined by the art critic Amnon Barzel, made of iron, wood bundles, glass, neon and newspapers. A reflection on the cosmic image of the spiral represented through the number sequence discovered by the mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci and chosen by the artist to represent the growth patterns of natural life.
If the form vanish, its root is eternal: in this verse by the mystic Persian poet Rumi, often present in Merz’s works, one can recognize Mario Merz’s complex view, based on the ideal dynamic continuity of the cosmos, of living creatures, and of nature’s processes of transformation.


La spirale appare is part of Centro per l'Arte Contemporeanea Luigi Pecci collection, 1990 acquisition.