The exhibition ‘Leaves of Stone’ opened at the Gagosian HK in
January 2016 presenting art that was as poetic as the exhibition title
suggested.
In Foglie di pietra,
several freestanding pieces comprised trees cast in bronze, their branches
entwined, embracing stone architectural fragments that had been carved into decorative,
classical acanthus leaves.
Another series, Indistinti
confine, featured marble trees, their limbs removed and replaced with bronze
knots. Sharp, rusting spikes appeared to pierce the trees in specific places,
from where the rust seemed to bleed down and into the marble trunks.
A large drawing took up one entire wall comprised of thorns,
thousands of them arranged as though to describe a pair of lips – Spine d’acacia.
Riflesso del bronzo
- a highly polished wall-mounted bronze mirror reminds us that mirrors in
antiquity presented to the viewer a warm, almost sun-drenched reflection. The
mirror was accompanied by its ‘reflection’, a casting that was then itself cast
and so on until there were the 8 versions we can see in the exhibition.
Through handcrafted stone and marble Penone comments on the
millennia-old relationship between mankind and nature and between past and
present cultures and throughout his work he achieves a poetry that takes on
physical form.
