This monographic volume is devoted to the artist’s watercolour production. Introduced by an essay by Sergio Risaliti, who is also the editor, the catalogue includes twenty-seven colour plates reproducing some of the artist’s large watercolours.

The book is the catalogue of the solo exhibition that the Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea of Trento dedicated to the work of the Turinese artist Marco Gastini from 22 January to 13 March 1993. Besides the rich iconographic apparatus, the volume opens with a critical essay by Danilo Eccher, followed by a contribution by Francesco Poli and texts by Lisa Parola, one of which is dedicated to the artist’s most recent works at the time. Parola is also responsible for the extensive biographical and bibliographical notes that closes the catalogue.

This book forms the catalogue of the group exhibition of the same name, curated by Dede Auregli, held at the Villa delle Rose in Bologna from 24 January to 11 April 1993. The group exhibition, with works by international artists such as Massimo Barzagli, Thomas Bernstein, Vittorio Corsini, Thomas Grünfeld, Vincent Shine, Wastijn & Deschuymer and Craig Wood, reflects on the theme of nature and landscape, on its logical representation and on the multiple directions of meaning that this theme suggests to the sensitivity of contemporary artists. In addition to an introductory text by the curator, the volume includes an essay by Stefano Zecchi.

The book, like Giulio Paolini’s works themselves, is coherently suspended between the visible and the invisible, the defined and the unresolved. Once again the artist looks at the riddle of his work as a participatory author and critic, in a dynamic progress, preserving intact the attitudes of wonder through which he fascinates the spectator with whom he identifies. In his book, the artist uses seven rooms – as many places of refraction, reference and accumulation, where anything can happen – to allow or suggest to the reader, who is mirrored in the work, the activation of an exchange of role and experience, to explore what happens outside and inside himself. The book features the photographic collaboration of Paolo Mussat Sartor.

Written by an avant-garde musician, this book confirms the typical critical attitude of the musical avant-garde towards classical theories. But it must be immediately said that the book does not deal with Theory of Harmony but only with Harmony. It is about the concept that in the field of music theory and didactics is used as an implicit foundation for so many behaviours and precepts. In these pages we do not analyse the musical mechanisms but the conceptual mechanisms. It examines whether the preceptual discourse in music is meaningful or not, and what contradictions and consequences it entails. The essay, written in the form of thoughts, phrases, aphorisms, often crosses over into existential fields and is undoubtedly the testimony of a situation into which we are ourselves drawn.

This book is the English translation of the artist’s writings first published in 1985. In line with the work system adopted by Mario Merz, the transcription of the texts does not maintain a chronological order, but identifies three moments of typological distinction in which different referential identities emerge in the development of the writing.

“Voglio fare subito un libro” (I want to make a book right now) is a collection of published and unpublished texts written by Mario Merz up to 1985, in which the dialogue between the ’forces’ of art and those of literature erupts at times luxuriantly and brilliantly and at times harshly and critically; it is concentrated or dispersed in various topics that flow through the pages like a river in flood. The poetic freedoms that Mario Merz appropriates in the act of writing are interwoven with suggestions and references to his art. An art managed on the basis of inventions: of architectural structures (the progression of tables, spirals or the better-known igloos...), of pictorial constructions (which have developed since the birth of Merz the artist), on the natural cyclical and numerical development of the elements (the application of Fibonacci’s numerical progression), on the use of materials rejected by society (broken glass, old newspapers...), on strategic statements (“Se il nemico si concentra perde terreno, se si disperde perde forza”, “Objet cache-toi”, “Città irreale…”) which are included in his works as axioms and emerge as traces in the reading of this book.” Harald Szeemann