ART CITIES:Lausanne-Giuseppe Penone

The act of drawing has always been central in the work of  Giuseppe Penone, both as a means of developing new ideas and for producing major works. He explores drawing in many mediums, using pencil and charcoal on paper or directly on the walls of galleries, creating images using natural materials. “The skin of the universe is mirrored on the tip of the pencil, the surface of the sculpture on the skin of the hands” Giuseppe Penone, 2002.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne Archive

Giuseppe Penone is regarded as one of the most important artists of his generation, his career spans over 40 years, beginning in the late ‘60s as he emerged as a key exponent of Arte Povera. His works were published in the Germano Celant’s “Arte Povera” in 1969 in a form of a sort of diary correlated with drawing, photographs and brief notes. The exhibition “Regards croisés” at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, reveals a lesser-known, more intimate side of the Italian artist, drawing as an ideal means to reflect on the relation between humans and nature. For this exhibition drawing is the point of departure, with the sculptures appearing only in counterpoint. The exhibition comprises 100 of Giuseppe’s Penone drawings dating from 1967 to 2006, 13 drawings from his personal collection by artists like: Alberto Giacometti, Amadeo Modigliani, Giacomo Balla, Pierre Bonnard, Kazimir Malevich and Louis Soutter, two “Big Verde del bosco” frottages, a selection of the famous “Gesto vegetale” bronzes entwined around plants, the big “Spazio di luce” and a figurative sculpture which has never been exhibited before. The museum’s two biggest rooms are given over to the sculptures, with the other spaces housing the drawings, the result is an alternation between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, between the idea of conceptual development and the finished work. Some highlights of the exhibition are Room 1.2: This part of the exhibition brings together various “Propagazione” works dating from 1993-12 with Adolfo Wildt’s delicately nuanced concentric circles and Amadeo Modigliani’s harmoniously arranged arcs. In these compositions the artist applies his ten fingers to a single sheet or ten sheets of paper and expands the initial fingerprints with fine, concentric pencil lines like topographies of unknown lands. Entirely devoted to nature, Room 2 has been transformed into a huge glasshouse. Against a backdrop of “Verde del bosco” gigantic compositions obtained by rubbing green leaves on tree trunks, it houses two groups of sculptures titled “Struttura del tempo” and “Gesto vegetale”. In room 3.2 , three Pierre Bonnard drawings in a completely different style serve as an “Introduction” to this section. His own “Transparencies” and “Anatomies” are drawings that try to “Create zones of matter, of light, while cancelling forms out and making them interpenetrate”. Room 5 is home to a single, meaningfully complex sculpture: “Spazio di luce” (a reconstitution of the 1969 project “Gli anni dell’albero piú uno”). “Looking at the interior, one’s gaze follows the absent core of the tree and the light reflected off the gold emphasizes the space, a space of light that testifies to the absence of the tree, a being whose form and existence are defined by the search and the exposure to the light”. A tribute to Kazimir Malevich are the works of Room 6, whose radical abstraction, far removed from any notion of nature, would seem to set him at the opposite pole from the mystical side of the artist. In addition to a black square, the artist has included a series of 24 drawing-collages of imprints of leaves and parts of the body coated with graphite powder and pigment, the imprints are lifted off with sticky tape and glued onto paper. Taking their inspiration from the movements of the cross, these works of Giuseppe Penone affect a concrete synthesis of the human, vegetal and extra-sensory worlds.

Info: Regards croisés, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Palais de Rumine, place de la Riponne, Lausanne, Duration: 25/9/15-3/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.musees.vd.ch