Renato Mertens Biography
Renato Mertens (1927 - 2008) was born in Tarcento (Udine) in 1927 to a Friulian mother and a Venetian father. Between 1945 and 1950 he lived in Venice where he met De Pisis. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law in Padua, but frequented the artistic environment and the studios of Venetian and Friulian painters with greater interest. In the years from '51 to '60 he carried out his pictorial activity between the cultural environments of Alto Adige and that of Friuli, starting his own research stimulated by the examples of the great masters of the early twentieth century and by the new experiments with the informal. Between 1961 and 1971 he lived in Ancona, then in Florence, then in Rome. Here, in the years of protest, he created his first materials on canvas with burns and plastic. Having moved permanently to Florence, Mertens concentrated his artistic attention on the female figure, starting a long journey into the world of women, seen both on a formal and introspective level. His works have been acquired by the Civic Museum of Pordenone and the Resistance Museum of Sant'Anna di Stazzema. The artist will then use unusual and recycled materials: newspaper pages, fragments of paper, cardboard and fabric, carefully selected and preserved to create collages and mixed techniques. The years from 1982 to 1986 mark the slow but progressive detachment from figuration. Sign, matter, relief, figure and non-figure are the elements of a refined dialectic that prepares the abstract phase. Then came important international recognition: in 2003 the exhibition in Salzburg and in 2007 the collective installation Camera 312 reminder for Pierre curated by Ruggero Maggi for the Milan Art Center, dedicated to the critic Pierre Restany, as part of the LII Esposizione Internazionale d 'Art the Venice Biennale.
