Giuseppe Penone advocates plant Art as resistance to the chaos of the time

Leaves, trunk, weeds… At the Marian Goodman gallery, between charcoals and slender sculptures, Giuseppe Penone creates a meditative symbiosis between man and nature.

EIs it a veil, a refuge, a corridor? There are many ways to approach Giuseppe Penone's new exhibition at the Goodman Gallery. We enter an enclosed space lined with papers which transform the gallery into an airlock of silence and meditation. From afar a gray pallor appears. When you get closer, the details are revealed: fine, slender, slender lines, growing like grasses, branches, in a vegetal and abstract disorder traced with charcoal. At 77, Penone still cultivates his garden. It's what he does best.

Huge hollowed-out wooden trunks, carpets of fragrant bay leaves, acacia thorns gathered by the hundreds to draw, on the wall, a trompe-l'oeil closed eyelid: for more than fifty years, the Italian artist has been arborizing, lumberjacking, traces its furrows. With such a particular work, confronting man and nature. He works on plants, digs a tree trunk, following the growth rings and knots in reverse. Sculptures frail like stems, sinuous like bronze, virginal like marble. Everywhere, for him, nature reveals itself as a primitive source. His Art espouses not a philosophy of a beta ecologist, but a quest for union and imprints: the earth binds itself to his hand, to his body, to his gaze.

Thus, in the gallery, surrounded by the wall drawing and next to a series of recent drawings, we find a small sculpture with an almost insignificant appearance and yet so intimate: Penone has clasped, with both hands, a little wet clay, modeled the hollow imprint of his fingers, which he then enhanced with yellow and wine pigments. From the series “Avvolgere la terra” (“Wrap the earth”), the modest work seems a gesture of protection. It reconnects with the spirit of the first parietal gesture, in the prehistoric era, the traces in charcoal and animal blood projected onto the rock of a cave. This sculpture unites the full and the empty, the visible and the hidden, the primitive and the current. She emphasizes her art as a nature gatherer. An art that can be found at the Bourse de Commerce, alongside the works of his friends, such as Giovanni Anselmo, Mario Merz or Jannis Kounellis, in the exhibition dedicated to the arte povera movement, which appeared in 1967. Their creations of copper, glass, cotton or burnt wood evoke a poetics of time. Or, in the case of Penone, a symbiosis of the body with the plant or mineral world, with reassuring elements. This was evident from the artist's beginnings, in 1969, when political attacks and bloodbaths began to mark Italy with the terrible chaos that would later be called the “years of lead”. Art, for Penone, will always be resistance and poetic resilience.

“Envelop the Earth”, by Giuseppe Penone. Until Dec 21 Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Marian Goodman Gallery, 66, rue du Temple, 3^e. 01 48 04 70 02. Free entry.

Giuseppe Penone in a few dates
1947
Son and grandson of farmers, he was born in Garessio (Piedmont).
1969
After his first exhibition at the Sperone gallery in Turin, he was the last and youngest artist to join the arte povera movement.
2007
Represents Italy at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting hollowed-out larch trunks, fragrant bark and a marble installation.
2020
Donated 328 drawings, dated from 1967 to 2019, to the Center Pompidou.
2023
Color paintings (this is new) born from his stay at the convent of La Tourette (Rhône), built by Le Corbusier.