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Giuseppe Penone

03 juillet 1986
02m 02s
Ref. 00133

Information

Summary :

Exhibit of Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone at the Beaux-Art Museum in Nantes. The artist talks about nature, vegetable forms and his art.

Media type :
Vidéo
Broadcast date :
03 juillet 1986
Source :
FR3 (Collection: Soir Nantes )
Personnalité(s) :
Giuseppe Penone
Themes :
Places :

Context

If he is classed amongst the major artists of Arte Povera, Giuseppe Penone is not without links to land art in his use of organic materials, as in his way of sublimating nature. Son of beekeepers, born Liguria in 1947, Penone kept from his origins a pagan love for earth, water and forest.

His work, with prehistoric and mythological influences, ties nature, culture and the human body while underlining the influence of time on the subject.Soffio 6, sculpture in terracotta that he made in 1978 from the mould of his body, irreparably evokes Prometheus modelling man out of clay. His relation with body work can nevertheless be distinguished from body art. If Penone uses his body, it is completely secondary to the work, which praises the natural cycle over anything else. What's more, he can be distinguished from monumental body art and artists such as Robert Smithson, Richard Long and Walter de Maria, by the human scale and intimate dimensions of his pieces.

Cécile Olive

Transcription

(Music)
Monique Josselin
Sculptor Giuseppe Penone is a genuine magician. With his bare hands, trees grow back from wooden beams. He goes back in time to find the shrub again, beneath the multiple layers of wood and makes an amazing fossil forest spring up which integrates itself superbly in the imposing setting of the Beaux-Arts Museum.
(Music)
Giuseppe Penone
That is the problem... it's the sculptor's job, to reveal shapes in general. It's a very old creation, one by someone who reveals things that... the shape already exists in the material.
(Music)
Giuseppe Penone
It's true that I lived in a mountain country when I was young. So I'm quite familiar with everything having to do with nature, with trees, with rivers, things like that.
(Music)
Giuseppe Penone
They're traces, they're a gesture, the fossilised gesture of the sculptor along with the bronze. So, previously, in the other work, in the tree work, there was the man's action, it's not visible, meaning that the sculptor's gesture isn't visible. It's the things that are in movement and the things that are motionless that are fossilised, it's the tree. Here, on the contrary, the sculptor's motion was fossilised. The sculptor's gesture is fossilised, and the vegetation is what's in action.
(Music)