Effective, perspicacious, suggestive, enlightening. This work of art pinpoints new and meaningful links, highlights different views, stimulate new ideas and knowledge. Gonbrich - referring to Constable’s metaphor that considers painting as a science where works of art are like experiments – was hinting that representing reality is a way of knowing it. The eye selects objects, chooses, refuses, organizes, analyzes, associates, discriminates them. And at the same time, the eye gathers, elaborates, interprets things with the help of senses, emotions and brain. The innocent eye is blind, a virgin mind is empty (Kant said so), and Saverio Mercati knows it well. In fact, he concentrates his work, based essentially on conceptual art, around daily routine optical efforts to stimulate an alternative way of uncovering unforeseen aspects of reality (or of the work of art). For example, with the light boxes presented in this particular art show, the artist forces the act of seeing into a mind provocation, an inversion in the process of interpretation. He takes the electrical mechanism of the neon light system, with reactors, start, wires and various connections, and applies the work of art on the back panel in order to light up a picture from behind (the very functional part of the light box technique), and he makes it become the photographed subject (with same size as the panel); then he puts the photo into the frame-container, perfectly registering it with the light coming from behind. This way, as Mercati explains, the real neon light shines through from behind and exalts the fake light reproduced by the photograph, mingling with it and creating a slight nuance variation. Facing the work of art, the artist generates in our view a doubt as for the relationship between truth-pretense, reality-visual artifice, simulation-imagination. While - if we stay at a distance, with a certain slant and with a particular light – we cannot avoid asking ourselves in confusion: .With no innocence and no virginity, our perception wanders adrift in the labyrinths of art. Constable would exclaim: “The experiment was a success!”. Maria Vinella