Forest Green

Giuseppe Penone, Albero Folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree) 

The last Giuseppe Penone exhibition I went to was a joint show with Richard Long back in 2011 - see the blog post I wrote then, 'To Repeat the Forest'. Now Penone is showing work at the Serpentine Gallery, with some large tree sculptures in the park outside. The one in my photograph above is reminiscent of the storm-blasted trees Salvator Rosa painted, its gold paint as bright as lightening in the May sunshine. It reminded me of the gold used to repair broken bowls in Japanese kintsugi - if only we treated trees with the care we treat valuable ceramics. 

In his Guardian review Jonathan Jones enjoys describes another tree sculpture. 'A grove of stones, worn smooth in riverbeds, surround two trees. But boulders also balance in their high branches. The Earth and sky are reversed. Are the boulders as real as they look? Is disaster about to descend?' As I stood under them I thought of that amusing scene in the film Official Competition where a filmmaker played by Penélope Cruz gets her actors stressed out by making them perform underneath a suspended rock. Jones starts his review by saying he was lured inside by the aroma of laurel leaves, and references the story of Daphne and Apollo. This myth also features in the new Ian Hamilton Finlay show at Victoria Miro, although Jones' hatchet job on that exhibition doesn't mention it. 

Giueseppe Penone, Verde del bosco (Forest Green), 2008

In addition to being a sculptor, is Penone ever what might be called a landscape artist? Yes, see above. The trees here are indexical signs bearing the imprint of themselves. The curators note that 'Penone wraps natural cotton fibres around the trunks of living trees and creates frottage rubbings using leaves. The distinctive furrows of the bark are transferred and recorded on the fabric, forming the foundation of the rich vegetation in the drawings.'

Penone's use of vegetable colour here brings to mind another recent Guardian article profiling Su Yu-Xin, 'The landscape artist who makes her paint from pearls, crystals and volcanic dust'. Her art almost sounds like a byproduct of the research that goes into sourcing her pigments. I was also reminded of the special ink Robert Macfarlane has been using to sign limited editions of his new book Is a River Alive? This uses water samples collected by participants on last year's March for Clean Water, mixed with water from the Pools of Dee in Scotland. Since 1981 Penone has done a whole series that I think Rob Macfarlane might like, To Be a River. Here are some quotes from Penone's website:

To know every stone, each ravine, each small bed of sand of a stream, to revisit it each year probing its bed to record the changes produced by rains, by frost.

No element, none of its forms are accidental.

Hands turning white from staying in the water to be, at least once, part of the river.

The bends in rivers are closely related to the fullness of the earth, the bends in the path to the emptiness of the air. 

The breath too, breathing expands following a path, sometimes meandering, other times more taut following the air currents. 

Filling a space with the meanderings of the breath, the volume of the breath produced by the life of a man.