“A man climbs a mountain because it is there.
A man makes a work of art because it is not there.”
Carl Andre, in Arte Povera (1969)

The artist-alchemist is the one aspiring to live, not to see. They choose matter over representation. Their wonder is found in the seemingly banal nature of ecological and biological phenomena, and not in the intellectual discussions that they can trigger. The artist-alchemist would rather leave untouched the very essence of things, plants and animals, so that they feel part of this unity, feel vital, without sensing that they are alone in this world. Whilst they simultaneously discover the magic of chemical reactions and compositions, the inexorability of time (everything is born, flourishes and dies), the precarious nature of materials and, indeed, of reality itself, they find out about themselves. They shed their intellectual duties as painters and writers to learn how to perceive, feel, breathe and walk. To understand that which makes them a human being.

Only by quoting Germano Celant’s wonderful 1969 essay can we understand what he meant by the poor art movement, the works of which now occupy the entire Bourse de Commerce-Collection Pinault in Paris, in one of the most highly touted exhibitions of the season. The Italian curator first coined the term ‘Arte Povera’ two years earlier, when he also went on to organise the first exhibition of this movement. He identified just over a dozen Italian artists – in the Paris retrospective there are 13 – who used ordinary, unassuming materials and straightforward techniques frequently used by craftworkers or mundane labourers. From embroidery, stencilling and glass blowing to techniques such as stoking a fire, combing mattress wool and carpentry. They exalted the material, the modest, in a bid to construct a physical account of the world, rather than an analysis of it.

This was the exact opposite of pop art, which included mass production, image portrayal, status and defiance. It also questioned the minimalism of the Americans, whose idea was more important than the art object, which could – and should – be made industrially. They were artists who, in the context of Italy’s ‘Economic Miracle’ following the end of the Second World War, with the country’s industrialisation and mechanised labour, wanted to look at their own country’s past to celebrate the handmade and what should be primordial for human beings. For them, energy and the transformation of matter were important, as were memory and emotions.

There is nothing shabby about this kind of art, for it has plenty to say. They used natural or rural materials, such as earth, potatoes, salad, water, charcoal, branches, trees and the living bodies of animals, which is why the name seemed fitting. But they also used man-made or urban materials, such as tools, metal scaffolding, steel plates, lead, light bulbs, wooden beams, neon tubes, extolling the interplay between these two worlds.

This idea is almost didactic in Michelangelo Pistolleto’s Terzo Paradiso (1933), who combined the infinity symbol with a third central circle: nature on one side, the artificial world on the other, and humanity in the centre. Arguably the most well-known of the Arte Povera artists, much on account of his eye-catching works with heaps of clothes and mirrors that are on heavy display at Collection Pinaut, the artist is currently busy producing and runs Cittadellarte, a powerhouse foundation for the arts. Naturally, these artists also defied the standards of beauty and what could be considered a piece of art

Arte Povera too departed from painting to produce installations, three-dimensional works that are in our universe, that are part of it, since we experience the world three-dimensionally and not two-dimensionally. Its installations breathe our air. And Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017) was an installation giant who blended sheet metal, hair, books, coffee, clothes, cupboards and wooden beams into ever more stimulating works. Even though the materials contradicted each other in their permutations, they appeared to have been made for each other. Many of his works are spread throughout the exhibition, such as Untitled (1967), a metal plate on the floor filled with coal, which mentions the key materials of the industrial revolution and the origin of the world: heat, the transformation of matter, fire and energy.

In the spotless central roundabout of the Stock Exchange – a state of the art sixteenth century building painstakingly transformed by architect Tadao Ando -, installations by all Arte Povera artists are presented together. They are: Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio (only one woman was part of the movement). In the adjoining rooms, the work of each of these artists is exhibited in greater depth, as well as pieces by other contemporary artists influenced by them, totalling 250 works.

The curator responsible for this enormous, somewhat tiring and at times rambling retrospective is Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, an art historian and curator with an impressive track record. She was formerly director of Turin’s Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and artistic director of documenta 13 (2012). The Italian-American is renowned for being one of the greatest living experts on Arte Povera, but she appears not to have undertaken any selection process for the Pinault Collection. She prioritised quantity over quality, resulting in many of the works being presented without any context or narrative, as if they had been thrown together by accident.

But the strongest drawback to her curatorship is that she failed to translate the 1960s movement into 2024. One of the major duties of a curator is to emphasise the relevance of works today. Her narrative is that the Arte Povera movement belongs in the past, whereas now, more than ever, we are debating sustainability, climate change and the destruction of planet earth by human beings. Ravaging nature was not a concern for Arte Povera artists. Concepts such as ‘Anthropocene’, denoting a new geological era typified by humankind’s impact on the planet, were only introduced in the 2000s and became popular even more recently. Nevertheless, their thinking on the human-nature bond could be greatly harnessed and used in our contemporary reality. Plus, they were already prioritising manual work and bringing craftsmanship into art, another recent trend in contemporary art worldwide.

Anyone looking at the building from the outside will find Giuseppe Penone’s Idee di pietra-1532 kg di luce (1947), a giant tree with heavy stones in its branches. The trunks are highly typical of this artist’s works, who cast trees in bronze to freeze time. Often exhibited amongst nature (in Paris, for instance, one of his fallen trunks is in Jardin des Tuileries), they draw attention to the fact that the whole landscape will blossom and die, except for this man-made object. This is a poetic eulogy to balance.

Renowned for his igloos, ice houses that retain the vital warmth necessary for life, Mario Merz (1935-2003) comments on the primal conditions of existence, and develops a metaphor for the relationship between the interior and exterior of these houses. Made of the most varied materials – the exhibition showed one made of glass, metal and a tree branch loosely held together -, they are vital architectural spaces.

Marisa Merz (1926-2019), who greatly influenced her husband’s work, was sidelined by the group for being a woman. She sewed her sculptures with copper wire, paraffin, wood scraps and cardboard, which, together with her drawings and paintings of women, resulted in intimate and spiritually searching works. The exhibition also presents her almost as if she were redundant, going against the Golden Lion she won at the 2013 Venice Biennale for the body of work she created throughout her life.

Paraphrasing Germano Celant, the artist-alchemist does magic because, to create art, they identify with life. And to exist is to reinvent a new fantasy every moment.

The exhibition Arte Povera, at the Bourse de Commerce of Paris, is on show until January 20, 2025.