Giuseppe Penone, Avvolgere la terra
by Daniela Lancioni 


During a recent conversation, Giuseppe Penone once again reiterated a desire he had manifested at the beginning of his career, that of “revealing aspects of reality… perceiving reality… reconsidering the measurements of reality… being adherent to reality…”. All these expressions emerged during the course of the conversation with him which took place in December 2019 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, as part of the “Sublimi anatomie” exhibition. Having been asked by Laura Perrone – who curated the art section of the exhibition – to write on Penone’s presence in the show, I thought it would be interesting to offer an introduction to the sculptures which had been included – Avvolgere la terra – bearing in mind the high regard in which this artist holds the notion of reality. Although this is an attitude he shared with others of his generation, Penone has experimented with it in an entirely original way which may well turn out to be a precocious intuition of certain recently-matured reflections among the new realists, and which is undeniably at the source of the work of no few young artists of today.

Avvolgere la terra is one of those titles with which Giuseppe Penone brings together a number of works under a kind of macro-series. It is a syntagma to which other verbal segments are added in order to name other works, or groups of works. Their common root indicates their inclusion within a common family, just as with the sculptures on display at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, all from 2014: Avvolgere la terra - Rising Earth, Avvolgere la terra - corteccia and two versions of Avvolgere la terra - il colore delle mani.  Penone has experimented with this system from the start – as in his Alpi Marittime series from 1968 –, much in the same manner as zoologists and botanists employ the taxonomical system to classify the animal and plant kingdoms from macro-categories down to single varieties.

The Avvolgere la terra series made its first appearance in 2014, initially with a few isolated elements shown in Paris (“Giuseppe Penone. Sculptures et dessins récents”, Galerie Alice Pauli, Paris 15 May – 19 July 2014) and New York (“Giuseppe Penone. Indistinti confini”, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 18 March – 25 April 2015). Different versions of Avvolgere la terra followed in the monograph exhibition devoted to Penone by the Museo Mart of Rovereto (“Giuseppe Penone. Scultura”, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto 19 March – 26 June 2016).

It is well-known that at times Penone accompanies – in books, never in the shows themselves – his works with a text. Universally recognised as having a literary value in their own right, these texts can either predate the actual artwork or be written after its creation. According to Penone, In both cases they are a way for him to “elaborate”, “understand” his images (Giuseppe Penone, Respirar la sombra. Respirare l’ombra, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, 1999, p. 10). Like the statements of conceptual artists, when they are published these texts are a useful tool for understanding the unusual dynamics, techniques and processes adopted by the artist. The two known texts which refer to Avvolgere la terra were both written in 2015, a year after the sculptures were completed.

“Its flesh colour, the smooth surface of the clay, its delicate and powdery porosity, tender to the touch like the reversed leather’s velvet, with its thin filament that made it adhere to the flesh it enveloped”. (2015)

The first of the two texts to be published (catalogue of the exhibition mentioned earlier, New York, n.p.n.n.) this reiterates two central themes of Penone’s thought – the tactile process and reasoning by similitudes. To the touch, clay is smooth, porous, dusty, soft, and clings to the hands like skin to flesh. It is a “velvet”, whose etymological association with animal vellus (fleece) allows Penone to introduce another of the recurring features of his artistic practice, that of reversal. The velvet/vellum of the surface possesses the same qualities as the underside of leather, with its filaments which in the body attached the skin to the flesh beneath. The brief text also suggests another association between the colour of the skin and that of clay.

The text has always been published together with some graphite on light-coloured paper drawings also entitled Avvolgere la terra, dated 2014. Penone has used a sketching pencil to trace the outlines of two hands joined together, with the parts where they touch filled in with a graphite pencil. The area in question is given prominence, as if something were taking – or had just taken – place there. It is a surface where the two hands show their skin, whereas elsewhere they are only outlined.

Looking at these drawings, we are inclined to read some kind of clue in them (not an icon, or indeed a symbol, arguably the key to interpreting all of Penone’s work) and wonder what took place on that portion of skin highlighted by the graphite pencil.

The large-scale mass of the morphologically-characterised clay sculptures at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni could be the macroscopic manifestation of such an event – the plastic result of the contact between hands and clay.

A proper description of these works, so intimately related to the process which generated them, would be incomplete without at least a hint of the process behind their creation. With a piece of clay held between his hands, Penone left his imprint on the matter by applying pressure to it in a process which is suggested by the title of the sculptures (to view see chapter IV of Ephemĕris, 2016, two videos, colour, sound, 9’14’’ and 4’46’’, filmed by Giampaolo Penco, Archivio Penone production, concerning other works but relevant also to all the sculptures of the Avvolgere la terra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGVzUpclyTA series). The lump of clay obtained in this process was then enlarged, but in Avvolgere la terra - Rising Earth and Avvolgere la terra - corteccia we find in the hollow created by the cast a small clot of earth moulded by the fist – again a kind of clue which in this case refers back to the action which gave origin to the work.  

In each of these works it is as if the positive and the negative shed their opposite nature in favour of a volume generated by touch.

The plasticity of the contact between hands and clay brings to mind further suggestions still. In Avvolgere la terra - Rising Earth, the mass of clay surmounts a section of a tree trunk covered in leather, whereas in Avvolgere la terra - corteccia it rests on a bronze cast of bark. Just like the bark of a tree, human skin is crossed by furrows which resemble both the body’s veins and the vessels through which the lymph of trees flows. They are all the product of a growth process and countless points of contact, curving in a growth spiral or forking. In Avvolgere la terra - il colore delle mani, the surface of the clay is partially covered with a blue and white coat of slip-painting. During the interview he gave at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Penone explained that “the paint was applied after firing… to better identify the position of the two hands, adding that “those were the two colours I had available”. But a text from 2016, written to accompany a new series of works entitled Equivalenze, contains the key for connecting those colours – white, blue and raw clay – to other similitudes: “the colour of an imprint, the colour of a breath, the colour of the earth that contains the colour of animal, vegetable, mineral existences, equivalent in time” (in Giuseppe Penone. Equivalenze, exhibition catalogue, Gagosian Gallery, Rome 27 January – 15 April 2017, n.p.n.n.).

In order to read any of Penone’s works, I believe it is always useful to reason as one would studying a genealogical tree, tracing an idea back to its origins and seeing how works of an entirely different nature in fact share a common branch.

Avvolgere la terra descends from a work entitled Cocci, which appeared in an initial version back in 1979. In this piece, Penone had cupped his hands together as he held an antique fragment of terracotta between his fingers. He then had liquid plaster poured into his hands and waited for it to harden. The resulting work – a cast with the incorporated fragment – had therefore not been obtained thanks to the matter being shaped by the hands but by the liquid matter solidifying between the hands. The hands had not performed an action derived from a sedimentation of techniques developed by mankind but a primordial gesture (cupping hands together to form a vessel for liquid or solid substances) which, combined with the organic properties of plaster, generated the shape of the work.

In close chronological proximity to the Avvolgere la terra sculptures, along the genealogical tree, we find the works entitled Germinazione, completed in 2005 but shown for the first time only in 2013 (“Giuseppe Penone. Germinazione”, Tucci Russo Studio per l’Arte Contemporanea, Torre Pellice, 1 December 2013 - 30 March 2014). In these works, Penone has associated hands with tree branches. Made out of resin and suspended with the aid of steel cables, these sculptures are the result of a complex process similar to sandcasting. A branch was impaled into earth, making its imprint before being removed with the aid of ropes, after which hands were inserted into the hole, penetrating the earth like roots. In the finished work – a cast of the combined imprint of branch and hands – the hands give the impression of emerging from the branch like new shoots.

The first sculptures of the Avvolgere la terra series, shown in Paris in 2014, are those entitled Avvolgere la terra – ramo and dated 2013. They consist of a clod of clay, obtained through the contact of the hands with the matter, placed on top of a branch which has been stood upside down.

The same lump of matter features blown up to gigantic proportions in the sculptures shown at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. This process of enlargement features often in Penone’s work. It could well be a means of increasing the visibility of a corpus generated by contact, one whose origin was as thin and imperceptible matter – the surface grease deposited by the skin of the hands or a breath following the features of a body. As part of his process of combining real data with the imagination, Penone has explained how this is a way of suggesting how a tactical interpretation can overflow into the indefinite space of perception (Giuseppe Penone, in the catalogue of the exhibition quoted above, Rovereto 2016, p. 148) to the point of becoming a universal paradigm of the existing. They key to this assumption is recurring in Penone’s statements and can be found in an excerpt taken from one of his notebooks:

“Two things formally determine the world. The first is content and the second is the container. These two forms are (…) primary in terms of necessity and function; the mankind-element is contained in air, water, earth; air is in turn contained in bottles, bags, lungs; water in bottles, in the earth, in the hollow of our hands, in a glass etc. etc., earth is contained in buckets, wheelbarrows, hands, shoes. These two alternatives are also reversible: a bottle can contain water just as water can contain a bottle. The skin is the outside of our bodies, the dividing and external element of our being which is in turn contained in air, in clothes, in the earth, in water etc. etc. but which can also be considered a container, or rather an element which protects and, in a sense, contains the rest of our bodies.” (Archivio Giuseppe Penone, notebook no. 12).

The notebook probably dates from June 1970, when Penone was about to begin work on Svolgere la propria pelle, a turning point piece which, with hindsight, is possible to identify as being the moment he definitively chose the path of the tactile over that of the visual. With its enrolment at the service of the consumer industry, the so-called ‘image culture’ had crucified sight as being the first of the senses to be tricked and discredited. Some artists abandoned the option of resorting to the inveterate artifices offered by painting and sculpting techniques, preferring to champion an authentic approach to reality dictated by the laws of physics or behaviour. Penone chose the sensitive, primary experience of the tangible as his personal instrument of knowledge. It is possible that as he was writing back in June 1970 – at twenty-three years of age and still a student at the Accademia di Belle Arti, or more likely along a path that had already prompted him to complete seminal works such as Alpi Marittime or Albero – Penone brought into focus the new perception of reality which such a choice would have revealed to him.

Adherence to the real was an inheritance, from a variety of provenances, which was common to many young artists of Penone’s generation. In Italy, the ideals of neorealist cinema – germinated from a condemnation of World War Two – resulted in a negation of historicising expressive forms (which in the jargon of the new generation became de-culture) in favour of a practice which aspired to verification. Influence also came from the realism professed by painters and sculptors who flocked to the banner of abstraction with the idea of rendering art accessible to a wider public and aspiring to a fairer world. On more than one occasion, Penone has reiterated his extraneousness to abstraction. In an interview from 2004, he described Italian Abstract artists’ rejection of the image as an intellectualistic choice detached from sensitivity, vacuous. He refused to adopt an iconoclastic perspective, channelling his work according to his desire to forge a new necessity for the image, one that was real (Entretien avec Giuseppe Penone par Catherine Grenier et Annalisa Rimmaudo, in Catherine Grenier, Giuseppe Penone, exhibition catalogue, Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 21 April - 24 August 2014, p. 265).  It is well-known how the most obvious legacy came from the realism expressed in a work in factual terms, with which from the beginning of the Twentieth Century artists had renounced the solitude of the creator in favour of sharing with the world the responsibility of their inventions. In their wake, at the beginning of the 1960s, reality surfaced everywhere in art. This was testified most by the inclusion of ready-made objects in artworks – images and behaviour whose origins lay in an experience which had matured beyond the confines of the aesthetic realm. 

From the start, Penone was interested in the materials, precociously maturing the awareness of what – over the years – would become the core of his poetic: the understanding that something crucial takes place in the action of contact. He has measured imprints, prints, casts, propagations, pressures, forkings, generated both intentionally and involuntarily. Under the guidance of such experiences, such sensitivity to touch, he has used the language of sculpture (but also as an exploration of the imagistic both in myth and the absurd) to forge a new approach to reality, altering existing patterns and convictions. His work has revealed the coexistence of animals with plants, minerals and objects, and their mutual interdependence. From the exchanges between these different kingdoms, Penone has developed an awareness of their similitudes. He appears to have brought into play his presence – his imprints, casts of his own body, the volume of his own breath, his own hands, as in Avvolgere la terra – in order to enter into contact with the proximity of matter in an active and receptive condition of its fluid state, its mouldable, soft and mutable condition: the growing tree, objects taking on the shape of that which they come into contact with, wind carrying seeds, buckling earth, water changing its course, hardening plaster, clay undergoing a morphological mutation. Each and every one of Penone’s actions derives from the encounter between his strength and that of another living being (the tree) or matter. “My work originates from the desire to achieve equality between my person and things”, states Penone in Respirare la sombra (quoted work, p. 10). Right from the dawn of his artistic career, “matured in a moment of strong reaction to the political and social system which left no room for indifference” (ibidem), Penone considered equality (the egalitarian status of mankind within nature a thing among things, on a par with all the objects around us) not a condition to be attained but an objective fact to be noted.

(With infinite thanks to Giuseppe Penone for the richness of his work and the patience with which he has allowed me to understand its dynamics. I would also like to thank his Archivio for allowing me to access the necessary study material and the relevant images, along with Lucilla Meloni for her valuable editing on this text and Irene Santori for gifting me a term I was unable to find).