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拍品专文
The art of Giuseppe Penone is rooted in the land from which he descends around the small village of Garessio in Piedmont, near the Maritime Alps. Garessio is a peasant village whose landscape of woodland plantations, tilled fields and carefully tendered vines has evolved largely unchanged throughout the centuries. Untouched by humanist idealism and the mathematical rationalism of the Renaissance - a period that shaped and defined so many of Italy's towns and cities - Penone's homeland is the product of a simpler, more ancient and more harmonious blend of human life with nature. For Penone, it is a living symbol of man's symbiotic relationship with his environment.
Part of a group of artists who in the late 1960s exhibited together under the name Arte Povera, Penone's work defies artistic categorisation. The son of an agricultural labourer - who was himself trained as a sculptor, he is both peasant farmer, traditional craftsman and neolithic primitive as much as he is a 'land artist', 'conceptualist' or 'environmentalist.' Equipped with an intuitive understanding of nature as a sculptural force, he has a keen awareness of the landscape as the repository of memory and a marker of time. The slow but fluid growth of trees, the fast running but slowly eroding flow of water turning rocks into pebbles, the breath of the wind that sculpts the leaves of the forest and the passage of time that moulds the rolling shape of the landscape are all phenomena that resonate deeply within him.
'Man is not a spectator or an actor' Penone insists, 'he is simply nature'; there is no distinction. For him, the response to nature as a sculptural force is merely a cultural echo of the land in which he grew up. 'Nature - the European landscape', Penone has pointed out, 'is artifice'. It is both a determining force on culture, and a 'construct' that has itself been shaped by culture. Unlike in America where vast areas of the landscape remain almost wholly untouched by man, the European landscape is wholly man-made. It is a 'cultural landscape' forged by the hands of man and the temporal passage of history (Giuseppe Penone quoted in Arte Povera in Collezione, exh. cat., Turin 2000, p. 236). Inexorably intertwined, man, nature and culture are all to some extent, expressions of the other. In recognition of this, Penone's art asserts this continuum between these supposedly separate elements, taking the form of 'interventions' that, as Germano Celant once pointed out, aim to keep the 'line of communication between human action and nature open'.
His 'choice to work with natural elements' he says 'is the logical consequence of an idea that excluded the product of society and that sought relationships of affinity with matter. The desire for an equal relationship between my person and things is the origin of my work'. Penone's work, like that of several artists of his generation evokes a perception of the world through what physicists refer to the context of 'deep time' - the temporal field wherein change is measured in millions of years. Given this temporal context, where everything is fluid and every material, be it stone or wood or human flesh becomes a constantly interacting and interchangeable entity, it is at the edges or skin of things or where the imprints it makes and which are made upon it - at the limits, borderlines and meeting points of temporal and material exchange - that the true nature of a specific moment in time or action is defined. And it is with these shared moments between materials or between man and material - constantly taking place on both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic scale throughout nature that Penone is concerned and which his art often poetically articulates and evokes. To this he brings his own innate elegance of style and a solemn poetry, establishing strange marriages between the bark of a tree and human skin for example, between the self-sculpting form of a human fingernail and a greenhouse. Like the action of breathing - another important element in his work - the notion of the continuum of nature flows almost effortlessly through all such 'interventions'. The breath that a man holds for a moment in his lungs is also itself but a part of the breath of the forest. When he breathes out, man puts his breath back into this forest. Life, like art, is perpetual exchange.'I feel the breath of the forest', Penone has said. 'I hear the wood grow slowly and inexorably, I model my breathing on that of the vegetation'. (Giuseppe Penone quoted in Giuseppe Penone Writings 1968-2008, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2008, p. 27).
Part of a group of artists who in the late 1960s exhibited together under the name Arte Povera, Penone's work defies artistic categorisation. The son of an agricultural labourer - who was himself trained as a sculptor, he is both peasant farmer, traditional craftsman and neolithic primitive as much as he is a 'land artist', 'conceptualist' or 'environmentalist.' Equipped with an intuitive understanding of nature as a sculptural force, he has a keen awareness of the landscape as the repository of memory and a marker of time. The slow but fluid growth of trees, the fast running but slowly eroding flow of water turning rocks into pebbles, the breath of the wind that sculpts the leaves of the forest and the passage of time that moulds the rolling shape of the landscape are all phenomena that resonate deeply within him.
'Man is not a spectator or an actor' Penone insists, 'he is simply nature'; there is no distinction. For him, the response to nature as a sculptural force is merely a cultural echo of the land in which he grew up. 'Nature - the European landscape', Penone has pointed out, 'is artifice'. It is both a determining force on culture, and a 'construct' that has itself been shaped by culture. Unlike in America where vast areas of the landscape remain almost wholly untouched by man, the European landscape is wholly man-made. It is a 'cultural landscape' forged by the hands of man and the temporal passage of history (Giuseppe Penone quoted in Arte Povera in Collezione, exh. cat., Turin 2000, p. 236). Inexorably intertwined, man, nature and culture are all to some extent, expressions of the other. In recognition of this, Penone's art asserts this continuum between these supposedly separate elements, taking the form of 'interventions' that, as Germano Celant once pointed out, aim to keep the 'line of communication between human action and nature open'.
His 'choice to work with natural elements' he says 'is the logical consequence of an idea that excluded the product of society and that sought relationships of affinity with matter. The desire for an equal relationship between my person and things is the origin of my work'. Penone's work, like that of several artists of his generation evokes a perception of the world through what physicists refer to the context of 'deep time' - the temporal field wherein change is measured in millions of years. Given this temporal context, where everything is fluid and every material, be it stone or wood or human flesh becomes a constantly interacting and interchangeable entity, it is at the edges or skin of things or where the imprints it makes and which are made upon it - at the limits, borderlines and meeting points of temporal and material exchange - that the true nature of a specific moment in time or action is defined. And it is with these shared moments between materials or between man and material - constantly taking place on both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic scale throughout nature that Penone is concerned and which his art often poetically articulates and evokes. To this he brings his own innate elegance of style and a solemn poetry, establishing strange marriages between the bark of a tree and human skin for example, between the self-sculpting form of a human fingernail and a greenhouse. Like the action of breathing - another important element in his work - the notion of the continuum of nature flows almost effortlessly through all such 'interventions'. The breath that a man holds for a moment in his lungs is also itself but a part of the breath of the forest. When he breathes out, man puts his breath back into this forest. Life, like art, is perpetual exchange.'I feel the breath of the forest', Penone has said. 'I hear the wood grow slowly and inexorably, I model my breathing on that of the vegetation'. (Giuseppe Penone quoted in Giuseppe Penone Writings 1968-2008, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2008, p. 27).