Giuseppe Penone Merges the Wild With the Wrought

‘A continuum,’ says Giuseppe Penone with a smile. The 77-year-old artist, a native of the forests that ring the Alps, gestures out towards Hyde Park. He is dressed in a dark blazer, proper shoes and a crisp shirt, embodying the worn elegance unique to the Italian pensioner. But he is far from retired.

We are sitting in the offices above the Serpentine South Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, where Penone is overseeing the installation of ‘Thoughts in the Roots’, the most comprehensive exhibition of his work ever staged in London. Outside, a tree gleams in the sun. It could be one of the more than 3,000 that populate the park: a handsome London plane tree, or the rarer, sweet chestnut or common lime. 

Yet, what at first seems like an innocuous natural occurrence is, in fact, a Penone – a sculpture that combines the splayed branches of a tree with splashes of molten bronze. The title of the piece, Albero Folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree, 2012), reveals its inspiration – a stately willow split by a force from the sky. Like much of Penone’s work, it dissolves the line between the natural and the man-made. ‘We must respect animals, stones, trees – they are living too,’ he says. ‘If you think in these terms, you can rejoin the idea of animism of nature, where all elements are living.’

This interest in the environment suffuses Penone’s practice, but he is wary of too didactic or literal an approach. ‘To be interesting as a subject for art, you have to avoid rhetoric,’ he says. ‘When it becomes rhetoric, the content is useless.’ 

Albero Folgorato encapsulates a show which will not be contained within the walls of the gallery. It is difficult to tell where the landscape ends and the art begins. ‘We are surrounded by trees,’ he says. ‘The interconnection between the park and the pavilion gave me the idea to create a show that exists both inside and outside.’

The show spans Penone’s five-decade-long career, throughout which he has explored the relationship between humanity and nature with a fluency achieved by few artists. Penone realised that the natural growth of trees, with enough time, gives them the capacity to speak deeply to human experiences as we pass through our tiny slice of life on this lush little blue dot.

‘We must remember the sense of equality between man and nature.’Giuseppe Penone

Penone is a central figure in Arte Povera, a radical art movement rooted in the upheavals of post-war Italy. By using commonplace and ‘poor’ materials, the group challenged what its practitioners saw as rampant and predatory consumerism, seeking to reconnect us with the elements.

Born in 1947, within three years of Italy’s liberation from fascism, Penone led a hermetic childhood in the alpine forests that surround Garessio, a small village in the foothills of the Italian Alps in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. His family were fruit sellers, and his grandfather was a farmer.

‘My culture was very limited,’ he says. ‘But my mother encouraged me. From the age of six, I was drawing. Her father, my grandfather, would create his own sculptures after work. So, she saw that in me.’

In the late 1960s, Penone moved to Turin to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he found a group of young artists, including Giovanni Anselmo and Michelangelo Pistoletto, pushing each other to explore new ways of working – Arte Povera in its gestation period.

‘It was not the idea to become an artist,’ he says. ‘It was the idea to do work that says something within this movement and moment.’ Penone was 21, the youngest of this new wave. Yet his upbringing – his intuitive understanding of the cycles and processes of growth and decay inherent to rural life – gave him an edge on his peers, for it distinguished his perspective. ‘What I knew best was the context of nature: the landscape, the river, the trees, the wood of the forest,’ he says. ‘This understanding of reality became the matter of my work.’

Visitors to the Serpentine will grasp this instinctively when looking upon the landmark Alberi libro (Book Trees, 2017), in which Penone uncovered the inner anatomy of a tree by carving away layers of wood, or Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow, 2000), where elements of human ageing are incorporated into fresh foliage. This act of revealing a former self, or merging the weary with the new, speaks to an experience many of us feel but struggle to articulate. While our being remains youthful, the vessel that carries it is battered by the weather.

‘When you touch something, you feel it, but the object or the person or the tree also feels you,’ he says. ‘We must remember the sense of equality between man and nature.’

Our time is up. He has a dinner that evening to prepare for. ‘But I don’t like the wine here,’ he says, gesturing towards the city. ‘At home, we make very simple wine. No additions. You choose the grape, you wait, and then you have a good wine.’ He pauses. ‘This is how to make good wine. No additions. But’ – he looks at me pointedly – ‘you have to wait.’

Giuseppe Penone’s ‘Thoughts in the Roots’ is Serpentine, London, until 7 September

^{Main image: Giuseppe Penone, Sguardo vegetale (Vegetal Gaze), 1995, photograph and ceramic. Courtesy: © Giuseppe Penone and Serpentine, London; photograph: George Darrell}