Giuseppe Penone at Marian Goodman

Writing in these pages last year, Marcia E. Vetrocq suggested that "Arte Povera has become Italy's very own 800-pound gorilla, an important but nonetheless limited critical construct whose sheer documentary bulk skews our understanding of its participants' long careers" [see A.i.A., Mar. '02]. This statement can be applied to Giuseppe Penone, whose current work reveals an ambivalent relationship to his Arte Povera origins. A recent show of two sculptures and nine wall reliefs invoked Penone's past with some humble, nontraditional materials, yet presented them in decidedly conventional formats.

Among the central members of the Arte Povera group, Penone was perhaps the one most drawn to organic materials. In a series of sculptures begun in 1969, for instance, the artist chiseled through the growth rings of wooden beams to excavate tender saplings from within. Trees continue to interest him, but now he preserves their fragility in durable metals. The two freestanding sculptures in this show, both titled Respirare L'Ombra (1999), made use of cast-bronze tree limbs and leaves to create vaguely human forms. In one, a delicate lattice of laurel leaves assumes the size and shape of a standing figure. Not quite fashioned in the round, this anthropomorphic topiary is propped up by several long boughs that extend from various points on the body to the floor. By translating natural materials into bronze figurative sculptures, Penone draws upon Italian artistic traditions. Indeed, this particular fusion of the vegetal and the corporeal quickly brought to mind Bernini's famous rendering of the mythic Daphne metamorphosing into a laurel tree.

A similar marriage of the unorthodox and the traditional informed many of the wall reliefs, which paired rectangles of pink or white marble with silk-over-canvas supports covered with acacia thorns. Echoing the natural gray veining of the marble slabs, Penone attached thousands of the long, curved thorns to the silk to create continuous striations across the abutting rectangles.

While musing on the various oppositions contained within these works (mineral/vegetable, smooth/prickly, subtractive/additive), one was also struck by their ultimate resemblance to abstract painting, a medium resolutely banished from the Arte Povera repertoire. Penone's latter-day interest in that art form seemed to be confirmed by Spine d'Acacia (Fronte), 2002, an enormous, silk-covered canvas comprising 21 constituent units. The entire surface bristled with countless acacia thorns. Clustered densely at the center, the thorns dispersed toward the edges in arching, branchlike lines, evoking both a drip painting by Jackson Pollock and a massive, awe-inspiring bramble.

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