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For the artist Giuseppe Penone, "man and the reality that surrounds him have the same value"

Drawings and sculpture around the project “Souffle” (1978) in the exhibition “Giuseppe Penone.

Drawings” at the Center Pompidou-Paris.

© Siegfried Forster / RFI

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

5 mins

The Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, born in 1947 in a village in Piedmont, is a giant of contemporary art and a pioneer in the artistic understanding of the links between man and nature.

Famous for his often monumental sculptures, the winner of the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2014 is currently demonstrating at the Center Pompidou-Paris the importance and essential role of his drawings, through an exhibition of 241 works.

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RFI: Throughout the world, you are famous for your sculptures and monumental works.

What is the role and status of drawing in your work?

Giuseppe Penone

The drawing is the moment of reflection or the notation of the ideas of the work that I want to do.

Sometimes it's something that inspires work, because maybe I'm working on an idea and there's something else that's going to pop up.

The drawing has a function, a reason which is linked to the idea of ​​the work.

For this, you can also notice different techniques regarding the realization of the drawings.

Each idea needs a specific material to be expressed.

That's what I'm looking for in the drawing.

It has a function of notation of an idea, sometimes of a project, other times also a function of reflection on the sculpture which has been made and which can lead me to other sculptures.

Is there a drawing that changed your life as an artist

It is perhaps a drawing that is also a synthesis of thought, 

(" 

 ").

This is a drawing made from the imprint of an inked finger.

Then I connected the lines of the fingerprint together, until I created a circle.

I continued this circle on paper with an idea of ​​propagation, of diffusion in space.

It was this link that interested me right away: the relationship between the lines of the finger, a sort of “animal” imprint, and the lines I made with the pencil.

These are lines that have a very different status, because the status of the imprint is something automatic – certainly reflected, but which belongs to everyone – but the lines of the drawing express an identity of thought through relation to the "animal" identity of the imprint.

02:25

Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone.

© Siegfried Forster / RFI

Some of your drawings are enriched with colors and watercolors, but the base remains India ink, typographic ink and graphite mine.

Are these materials the blood that flows in your drawings

Yes, we can say so, because ink, pencil, charcoal, these are stable organic materials.

At the same time, it is "dirt", for example when you stain your hands with it.

Charcoal is dirt that can become something very valuable, it is the organization of “dirt” on the space of a sheet.

The exhibition insists on the presence of six sculptures next to the drawings.

What is the nature of the link that exists in your works between drawing and sculpture

The most emblematic example could be

(“ 

) in terracotta.

You have drawings that are drafts of the work itself, reflections on the work or what prompted the idea for the work.

Other drawings are associated with the

, but have a completely different character, because they are drawings based on the idea of ​​the body of man, or, in this case, of woman.

There are also cases where the drawing enriches the reading of the work.

“Propagazione” (1994) in the exhibition “Giuseppe Penone.

Drawings” at the Center Pompidou-Paris.

© Siegfried Forster / RFI

In your works, the gap between human and plant is often reduced.

Today, more and more artists are trying to move away from anthropocentrism.

Do you feel like you were a pioneer in the field

My first work was a tree that I took in my hand [

, 1968].

I associated my person with the being tree which was a form in evolution, in growth.

Afterwards, I made a substitution of my hand, with a cast of my hand in steel and bronze which I put on the tree.

My idea was to associate my body with the body of the tree with this gesture.

There was parity between the two elements.

The tree was going to become aware of the shape of my hand, and I was becoming aware of the development of the tree's life.

It was an egalitarian vision between the two elements.

Your question concerns something that is the basis of my work.

I think that man and the reality that surrounds him have the same value, and sometimes we can even have doubts... For example, when we consider the life of a man and the life of a stone which is enormously more long as a man's life.

So what is more important?

The life of a man who will disappear after a hundred years, if he has an extraordinary life, or the duration of a stone found in buildings, houses, and which has already been seen by our ancestors and which will be seen again by future generations?

If we see reality from this angle, considering man more important than the other elements, it is not reasonable if we consider the whole reality of the universe.

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