ART-PRESENTATION: Giuseppe Penone, Indistini Confini-Noce
Born in 1947, in Italy’s Piedmont region, Giuseppe Penone has been exploring materials, forms and processes inspired by nature. As early as the end of the 1960’s, the sculptor shared the reflections of artists principally active between Turin and Rome, united under the banner of Arte Povera by the art critic Germano Celant.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Centre Pompidou Metz Archive
All the Arte Povera artists worked from raw materials, from pure energies, from everyday experiences or linguistic action. Faced with the collapse of the Italian economic miracle, as with the development of a consumer society and cultural industries, the “poor art” that they created, aspired towards radical austerity, to a reduction of means down to the essential, to a nomadism outside of institutions. An assumed simplicity, which prefigures current practices, eager to project sobriety. The forest, the mountain, the river, the body are at the origin of Giuseppe Penone’s work. His preferred gestures are simple: to kiss or take hold of a tree trunk in order to feel the slow process of concentric and upward growth; find the twigs burrowed in a manufactured wooden beam, by carving one by one the wood’s growth rings… A living model of a perfect sculpture, the tree adapts to its environment in an exemplary fashion. The artist compares it to a skater and a tightrope walker, perfectly stable on unstable ground, defying gravity in order to catch the light. From the Château de Versailles to the Inhotim Park in Brazil, the sculpted trees by Giuseppe Penone have adorned the most classical of gardens as well as the wildest of forests. Jointly invited by the Saarlandmuseum de Sarrebrück and the Centre PompidouMetz, the artist in “Indistini Confini-Noce” intervenes in the spring of 2020 in the public space of these two cities, in order to implant two twin sculptures: the bronze casts of trees, holding in their branches a river stone, of which the form is suggestive of a skull will signify the emergence of a thought. In Sarrebrück, the implanted tree, close to the Saarlandmuseum is surrounded by Jaumont stones, recognisable by their typical golden hue from Metz. In Metz, the tree is accompanied by pink sandstone from the Vosges, specific to the region of La Sarre. A geological dialogue will thus be established between the two cities. Finally, to celebrate its 10 years, le Centre Pompidou-Metz is inviting Giuseppe Penone to take over its Forum for a protracted duration. The artist implants in this freely accesible space, largely open to the exterior and remarkably high, an unprecedented installation: the bronze cast of a walnut tree of around 15 metres high and of which certain segments and ramifications are in white marble. The branches of the tree and the splayed framework of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, will enter into resonance, sharing the similar structure of a meshed parasol
Info: Centre Pompidou Metz, 1, parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme, Metz, Duration: 21/3-5/9/20, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Thu 10:00-18:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.centrepompidou-metz.fr
The Centre Pompidou-Metz is temporarily closed due to the situation with the new coronavirus. Preliminarily Centre Pompidou-Metz will remain closed until further notice.
