Truth to nature: the Centre Pompidou reveals Penone to be a sensualist rather than part of the Arte Povera movement to which he tends to be attached

The faculty of perception of smell is rarely exercised in the appreciation of the visual arts--hearing and touch are more repeatedly evoked--but to Giuseppe Penone's installation Breathe the shadow it is integral. A expanse in the Centre Pompidou has its walls overlayed by cages of laurel leaves. The fragrance is intoxicating, and approachs as a splendid surprise in the sterile museum environment. The event on visitors is correspondingly unusual, and I saw several tribe sit down as if in the shade of a tree The range also contains a pair of alloy of copper lungs articulated by moulds of laurel leaves; clearly, the leaves should be 'breathed'. The bring under rule of the work is breath, the two as something inside us, and as a connection to the external landscape. The installation be subsequent tos however, as all appeal to the senses

Penone, an Italian from an agricultural labourer family that included a sculptor, has been active for the past thirty-five years. He is always negotiating the relationship between humanity and nature, oftentimes collapsing the distinction between them. He one time made a bronze cast of his be in possession of hand, which he used to grip a sapling. As photographs above ten years demonstrate, he come aftered in carrying out the promise of the title: The tree will continue to expand except at this point. The human action has become as long-lasting as the tree while the tree is revealed as a fluid organism rather than a permanent lump

That 'nature' is an intellectual put together is not wasted on Penone, and his work is ofttimes anti-anthropomorphic, by which nature--whatever it is--is allowed to be its be in possession of thing. To repeat the forest a locate of wooden beams and planks that have been meticulously chiselled and sanded along the tree rings to reveal the actual tree at an earlier date. The man-made reveal, the natural, after all. The argument for an autonomy of nature is not just conceptual or witty on the contrary also aesthetic: the smooth, pliant and varying branches are a great deal of more attractive than the ham-fisted geometry of the beams. of the like kind musings take many forms. Penone makes a precise model--down to each crack and pore--of a stone of rest in a river, as if to transcript nature without the anthropological tyranny of the imagination. Elsewhere, in To invert the eyes, the artist is photographed wearing mirrored contact lense that effectively blind him, in like manner that he can imagine his material part without using nature as a subservient scale.

Not all the works are equally lucky and they become willfully dusky or unrewarding--in that way that has repeatedly rightly given contemporary art a bad name--when the materials are not bucolic, mainly because Peonone is at his best as a sensualist. Slide machines throw out onto blank plaster fragments of the body--such as a paw or a brow--the 'details' of the skin, similar as toenails or eyelashes. The installation, like To invert one's eyes, demarcates the material part but here nature is not a foil, and the stale heated air around the projectors make a derision of the gorgeous trees and fragrances elsewhere.

The curatorial approach is enlightening. The museum has made an effort to encourage a relationship between humans and landscape. To recreate the forest is lit sharply to hurl a seemingly real forest against the walls, and visitors are allowed--unusually--to weave in between and indeed underneath the tree The order of display, meanwhile, is coherent, a quality of which conceptual-ish artists, who like ideas, are perhaps more in ne than others; the exhibition is roughly chronological, on the contrary all the depictions of breath are together.

Catherine Grenier's catalogue is of a similarly high standard, and not solitary because it is recent. The former regard works are catalogue essays by means of Germano Celant, who is credited with making Penone an international artist (by spotting him at the Sperone gallery, Turin, in the late 1960s) and adopting him as part the Arte Povera pantheon. The interview within the catalogue places Celant's contribution into perspective. Penone explains that he himself had no intention of 'becoming' an Arte Povera artist--although he knew artists of that ilk--and that Celant's ideas did not influence him at all. It is a useful confirmation, because although Celant sometimes writes well about Penone--Grenier oftentimes cites him--his texts are sometimes guilty of actually describing the art works themselves, as if critical theory was of somehow or other more important. Grenier never strays from the works, and her interview reveals that Penone is as interested in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Goethe's musings upon nature, as in arte Povera.

The catalogue, indeed, makes on the outside Penone's work to be sad, level sinister, rather than barrenly quick The bronze hand that gripped a sapling, it is explained in a chapter entitled 'The monstrous', does not have a simple result: the tree became swollen around the hand and grew away from it; this is no of unity of nature on the other hand a deformity. Penone encourages solace in nature on the other hand not without knowledge that it will fail. For in what way long will the laurel leaves get scent of sweet?

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