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Lot Essay
For Penone, nature is the universe providing the key to his artistic inspiration. He compares and confronts himself with it continuously and consistently; he "intervenes" with it almost as if to highlight the relationship man-nature. In his aesthetic this relationship is translated into a sort of embrace, in which the artist searches for traces of himself and, at the same time, pursues an "exchange" with nature that might enrich his life and inventiveness. Treccia (Plait) is a piece that helps to understand the process followed by the artist in his work: in 1977, Penone inserted, between the main trunk of a wisteria and a younger branch that had grown from it, a plastic element (a pipe) from which long copper wires protruded. Nature has followed its course, in the sense that the plant has grown, like all wisteria it is twisted, entwined, with an extraordinary network of branches and curves that almost constitute a wooden plait. The foreign element introduced by the artist has been perfectly absorbed, swallowed by the natural process, to the extent of constituting the final physiognomy of the plant itself.
Twelve years after the "graft", the artist, clearly satisfied by the completion of his "intervention", cut the wisteria, making it into a significant and emblematic example of his work. Treccia is now installed in our house, close to a large window, beyond which other wisteria remind it of its origins. It doesn't seem to have any regrets: in the meantime, it has become a work loved and admired by all.
Twelve years after the "graft", the artist, clearly satisfied by the completion of his "intervention", cut the wisteria, making it into a significant and emblematic example of his work. Treccia is now installed in our house, close to a large window, beyond which other wisteria remind it of its origins. It doesn't seem to have any regrets: in the meantime, it has become a work loved and admired by all.