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

The book is a collection of texts produced by Michelangelo Pistoletto from 1962 to 1989, arranged in chronological order. With an interweaving of materials, this book brings to the surface the most stimulating faculties of that organic whole of artistic and literary work with which Pistoletto elaborates around thirty years of creativity. Un artista in meno grows around the book L'uomo nero (The Bogeyman), reflecting and overturning its structure, in which the canons of closure and opening are self-eliminated by making its two parts converge on a "sign" (the signature), two-thirds from the beginning of the book. Paradoxically transposing the specular circuit of attraction and repulsion onto a circuit of cross-references between the writing and the work of art, in Un artista in meno the photographic images of works live on, like moments alternating with theoretical writing, poetic texts and work notes. It is exemplary how the immediate impact of Minus Objects compares and complements the speculation of Famous Last Words or the historical dilation of the perception of a work with the grammatical simularity of the Rocking Temple...

Pistoletto writes: 'Most of the time the book is closed. Only accidentally does it open, like life. A mirror in a dark room'.

Michelangelo Olivero Pistoletto (Biella, 25 June 1933) is an Italian artist, painter and sculptor, animator and protagonist of the Arte Povera movement. In 1962 he produced the Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings), with which he gained widespread recognition by participating in international Pop Art exhibitions. In 1964 he produced the Plexiglass, which opened the season of Conceptual Art. Between 1965 and 1966 he produced the Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), considered fundamental for the birth of Arte Povera. In the 1990s he founded Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, placing art in an active relationship with the various spheres of the social fabric in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation of society. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2004, the University of Turin awarded him an honorary degree in Political Science and on this occasion the artist announced the birth of the Third Paradise. In 2007 he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem "for his consistently creative career as an artist, educator and activist, whose tireless intelligence has given rise to premonitory art forms that contribute to a new understanding of the world". In 2013, the Louvre Museum in Paris hosted his solo exhibition and in the same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo. His works can be found in the collections of major modern and contemporary art museums. Official website of the artist: www.pistole

“Just as we saw a moment ago, even before opening it, this volume offered a shape and a colour: a green square immediately evokes a gaming table and it is here that I am now going to arrange the various and changing faces of a solitaire”. Giulio Paolini, author of this artist’s book, guides the reader through his works from the beginning, introducing him to a more “strictly personal” knowledge of his enigmatic work. In addition to a rich bibliography, the book includes historical texts by the artist and others that have never been published before.