Emilio Prini, a protagonist of the Arte Povera movement from the beginning, is one of the most enigmatic artist of the moment, and not only in Italy. His "rare-rapid" presences have exasperated this aspect of his image as an artist, but these are the consequences of his "corner" towards himself and towards history. When Attitude Becomes Form (held in Bern in 1969) is the famous title of one of the exhibitions he participated in. Isn't art a lifestyle choice, which has to confront exposure, expositions, the works of art? A text by Germano Celant underlines "The world of artistic work boils down to a way of being and of acting." Prini empties out the relationship of the artist-person with the object-artwork, narrowed as much as possible to a standard, to an "empirical rather than speculative character of research", on the "side of the biological key of life". His work transposes material-quantitative data of reality in something else, in a game of "standards" that traps the identical and yet diverse, in fact "alien" thought between its teeth. After participating in all of the most important international exhibitions between 1967 and 1971, Prini brought his participation in exhibitions to a minimum: a one-man exhibition entitled Fermi in dogana at the Ancienne Douane in Strasburg in 1995, Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, Arte Povera at the Tate Gallery in London in 2001, and his American "tour". Faithful to the material from the beginning, Prini repeats on this occasion as he has done in the past, recombining the works of those years, these too the same and yet together completely different. In a room in Montalcino he creates "Variation on Fermacarte 1968", made up of photographs and lead weights. As he once declared synthetically, "I HAVE NO PROGRAMME, I PROCEDE TENTATIVELY, I DON'T SEE TRACE OF THE BIRTH OF ART (NOR OF TRAGEDY) BECAUSE THE C.S. IS NOT THE FRUIT OF THE PURE HUMAN LABOR, (BECAUSE I DIDN'T MAKE THE CHAIR THE TABLE THE SHEET OF PAPER THE PEN WITH WHICH I'M WRITING) I DON'T CREATE, IF IT IS POSSIBLE."