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Exhibitions / Still Life / Mario Merz - text by Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean portrays Arte Povera artist Mario Merz in San Gimignano, Tuscany, one year before he died.

I had already met Mario three times before we met that summer in San Gimignano. The first time was in Bologna. I saw him, watched him, and eventually, after dinner, went up to him and told him he looked exactly like my father. He kissed my hand and walked off. After that, I hounded the official museum photographer for a photograph of him, which she said she would send me, but never did. I wanted to put images of the two men side by side to document the likeness as proof of my objectivity.

I met him again in Paris, and chanced across him and Marisa having breakfast in Place des Vosges. Then, once again at the Venice Biennale, where I shamelessly tried to take the photograph on a borrowed camera, before the battery ran out and the camera was taken off me. So when I walked into that garden in San Gimignano, and saw Mario at the head of the table under the trees having lunch, I was immediately compelled to re-establish my vigil.

On my next visit, I brought my film camera with me. For a week, I was driven around in search of a subject for my project there, but could find nothing. And every evening, we would have dinner together around the table under the trees and I would quietly observe my true but apparently impossible object of desire. On my last day, I had no choice but to ask. After chocolate and frutti di bosco ice cream, I said, “Mario, can I film you?” “Yes”, he answered, “But no speaking.”

So that afternoon in the garden with the table under the trees, we made a film. Mario picked up a large pinecone and cupped it in his lap. The sun went in and out with the impromptu speed of an ungainly fade. Funeral bells began tolling in the main square; cicada stopped and started under their own command, and crows flew to and from the roof, while Mario chatted away. He sat on various chairs in different places in the garden, and I took four reels of film before the sun gave into the rain clouds and a thunderstorm began.

Something else happened. Suddenly, I could no longer see my father’s features in Mario’s face, nor in the movement of his hands, or the small steps he took when he walked. It seemed as if the genesis of my desire had burnt itself out, and the making of the film had purged me of my subjectivity. Mario Merz had at last become Mario Merz to me. It was as if their beguiling similarity had been but the means to beget myself a film of Mario in the garden that afternoon in San Gimignano. And as for the striking, destabilising likeness to my father, I could barely see it anymore.


Text by Tacita Dean