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'Sculpture is a journey to be travelled like the tree, memory of the forest.' 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. The son of an agricultural labourer - who was himself trained as a sculptor - Penone defies artistic categorisation. 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. 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 pointed out, aim to keep the 'line of communication between human action and nature open.' One of Penone's first 'interventions', entitled, Scrive, legge, ricorda (Write, read, remember), was the hammering into a tree in the woods around Garessio of a metal wedge inscribed (in mirrored relief) with the numbers 1-9. Taking the form of an interaction with the tree, Penone's intention was that the tree would actively respond to this 'exchange' in a way that formally echoed the language and thinking of man. Set into the trunk of the tree, the mirrored relief numbers would cause sap to grow around the wedge in a form that would leave the progression of 1-9 inscribed and readable on the inside of the tree. In this way the tree would itself have ' written', ' read', and absorbed/'remembered' this progression of numbers through the fluid path of its growth around the wedge. Another intervention from this time which also signalled Penone's understanding of the tree as a soft and fluid entity growing and developing similarly to man, though at a radically different temporal rate, was his Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (It will continue to grow except at this point) in which a bronze cast of the artist's hand was set into the trunk of a tree, forcing the plant to grow around it. 'The tree, once it has lost or consumed every trace of emotional, formal and cultural significance,' Penone stated, appears as a vital, expanding element, proliferating and growing continuously. To its energy, another energy is attached - mine. Its reaction is the work.' The fact that such points of contact would, like a memory, continue to be recorded within the structure of the tree eventually led Penone to the realisation that all timber, even that which forms the tables and chairs of human domestic life, contains within it a structural memory of the tree from which it derives. By following a process of carving along the line of a growth ring in the wood and by recognising the knots as points at which a branch would be, Penone began, in the series Ripetere il Bosco (Repeating the Forest), his continuing practice of revealing the trees hidden within all wood. Such works brought Penone's art into contact with the reality and complexity of modern urban life and, unlike most of his earlier 'interventions' in the landscape, they also brought his work into the modern gallery space. Penone was the last of the artists that German Celant chose to be included in his first shows of 'arte povera' - the largely urban and gallery-based movement of the late 1960s. This eclectic group of artists were brought together primarily by the shared need to respond in a radically alternate way to the current direction modern society appeared to be imposing on them. Penone's inclusion in 'arte povera' played an important role in introducing a powerful sense of dialogue in his work between nature and modern man. His most famous work in this respect is his Rovesciare i propri occhi (To reverse one's eyes) first enacted in 1970. Donning mirrored contact lenses, Penone, effectively blinded himself or as he put it, 'reversed his eyes', to look inward in contemplation of his own body in a state of isolation from the confusing distractions of the contemporary world - features that are reflected for the viewer in the artist's eyes. An iconic self-portrait, which throws the viewer's gaze back on itself while also offering a view of the artist, it is also one which because of the artist's age, clothing and urban background is rooted to the time and place in which it was made. Negating as much as it reveals, this action/work is a clear and demonstrable statement of the direction in which Penone, as an artist, looks, sees and operates; 'discovering a landscape that is hidden by sight'. It reveals the artist as a mediator, not in a shamanic, self-aggrandising or Beuysian way, but as an almost invisible and permeable membrane between two worlds - as a skin or point of contact. Like the 'breaths' which Penone photographed within the forest in the late 1960s and later enclosed in clay in his terracotta Soffi - organic anthropomorphic amphorae impressed with the imprint of the artist's own body - the notion of the continuum of nature flows almost effortlessly through all of his work. Everything is fluid, nothing is fixed or permanent, all is interchangeable and interdependent. The breath that a man holds for a moment in his lungs is 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.' Robert Brown

Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947)

Torace

Details

Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947)
Torace
signed and dated 'Giuseppe Penone 1972/73' (on the reverse of the plaster torso)
plaster and hair, slide projector and slide
dimensions variable
plaster torso: 8 x 12¾ in. (20.2 x 32.4 cm.)
Executed in 1972-73

Provenance

Galerie Paul Maenz, Cologne.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1979.

Exhibited

Leverkusen, Kunstverein Schloss Morsbroich, Die verlorene Identität: Zur Gegenwart des Romantischen, May - June 1974 (illustrated).

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis. Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Lot Essay

Torace (Thorax) is one of an important series of works made by Penone in 1972 that depict parts of the artist's body cast in plaster and illuminated by colour slides of these same fragments projected onto them. Part of Penone's continuous exploration of the way in which man as an organic being interacts with and effects the natural world around him and is in turn affected by it, this series of works evolved out of an earlier project entitled Svolgere la propria pelle (To unroll one's skin). This was a book that mapped the artist's anatomy using six photographs of a glass slide pressed against different parts of his body.

For Penone the skin as the exterior form of the body - the part that both interacts with the outside world and which formally defines the line between the person and his environment - is a key point of encounter between man and nature. A natural sculptural form, the skin is a natural limit, an encasement and definition of the human form at any given point in time. Never static but constantly changing, it, like a river or the bark of a tree, is in a permanent state of flux and growth. Casting a body part in plaster freezes this form in a specific moment in time rather like a fossil, another important natural process which for Penone is closely related to the concept of sculpture.

In Torace, Penone presents a tautological image of his chest. Through the process of sculpture and photography he has fixed and arrested the process of growth in a specific time and space and interrupted it with a hiatus in much the same way that he had done in 1968 when he inserted a bronze cast of his hand into a growing tree in the self-explanatorily entitled work Continuera a crescere tranne che in quel punto (It will continue to grow except at this point). In the process of making the plaster cast of his chest for this work, several hairs were removed and remain absent from the photograph which was taken after the casting. In a reversal of his insertion of an inanimate cast into the living organism of a tree, Penone has here reunited these hairs with image of his chest by inserting them into the inanimate, fossil-like plaster-cast replica of where they originally came from. By projecting the photographic image of his later hairless chest over the plaster cast, past, present, and future seem somehow transcended and a living or animate quality appears to have been bestowed on this antiquity-like fragment of the human form.

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