Giuseppe Penone: Drawing Center, New York

GIUSEPPE PENONE

DRAWING CENTER novel YORK

KIKI SMITH

MOMA QN fresh YORK

Fable I: "Giuseppe Penone: The Imprint of Drawing." In the anteroom of the Drawing Center a giant barred the way, buried up to his eyebrow from which his colossal forehead, its worry lines traced through thorns, emerged aboveground. Never mind the diadem of thorns; for me that gargantuan tracery called up Briar Rose's thicket. For it was hard to diocese the forehead for the forest of finger-pricking points. Indeed, it wasn't until later that I knew Penone's Spine d'acacia (fronte) (Acacia Thorns [Forehead]), 2002 was a forehead at all. Stand to the side, as I did, approaching gingerly, and all you saw was that spiky coppice daring you to touch, to perceive instead of see, and then fall below the somatic sway of a world in which you were on a sudden so impossibly small as to be blind to the gestalt of everything around you. You became like a mount crawling across a spine-sprouting surface thus expansive as to require a map for its traversal--except here the surface was its be in possession of map and the fly could not read it. Stepping away from the side, you began to become greater [i]or[/i] larger and see something develop: not forms, nor directions [i]or[/i] part of to the other the prickly maze, but a cursive seize here and a springing are there--gradually you became aware that those linear fragments might be herculean stray hairlines. Step farther away and orient yourself les sidelong to the spiky surface, and growing more you began to be aware of openings, clearings, paths end the spiny woods: the fissures between ranks and clumps of thorns, the spaces that helped to define lines as lines, gaps that were the negative of those lines, broken-off trails of not-line that meandered upon either side of strings of thorny line starting and stopping here and there.

pace back farther, grow larger and stand squarer to the plane of the false wall, and then, like a cartoon character standing upon what she thought was a harmless hillock of inanimate matter but was really an enormous beast about to awake from its repose and shake the minute irritant from its back, you noted the massive expansion of that surface and began scanning it to take in whatever patterns there were to be discerned among the thorns and the weave of shadows cast by dint of them. It became less evident that they were sharp protrusions that might bite your skin if you got too shut and bumped into them. Backing away, you knew in a flash that you were facing the top of the head of a giant who couldn't quite diocese you ... yet.

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Quickly you skirted the colossus and come intoed the atrium. There you set on the left, Palpebra (Eyelid), 1989-91 dark mists of eyelids with shards of a repeated profile caught in them. All nose and unseeing organ of vision its gaze canceled out by dint of an inked fingerprint in place of a pupil, that reiterated part profile was oriented sidelong to its surface, as if you were to be encouraged to advance so close that your have a title to cheek and nose touched the feltlike fiber of which it was made, and your have eyelids brushed up against it without your organ of sights being able to see it. Your organ of sights felt as if they felt the felt instead, and base it slightly hairy, not wrinkled as you cogitation from a distance.

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upon the back wall was Impronte rilevate sulla matita durante l'esecuzione (Prints Left upon the Pencil During Execution), 1975/2004--four giant fingerprints where a certain number of huge humanoid had dirtied the wall with smutchs left by the giant pencil stump held between his giant fingers. Then, turning to the right, you lay the foundation of yourself held in the mammoth hands of another Gulliverlike personage with hands for a like reason large that the whorls of the ten fingertips became channels, conduits and troughs, tree rings and spiraling whirlpools, surrounding you in your one time again Lilliputian dimensions. The hands of L'impronta del disegno (The Imprint of Drawing), 2002-2003 were for a like reason large that where their prints began was invisible to you, and where they extremityed disappeared off the horizon. You were a tiny material substance whose particularities--among them your body's sex--were too diminished to be perceived, or to be of a great deal of account to anyone, including yourself. Nonetheless, you were a material part encompassed by a much larger single and neither of you could diocese each other's outlines: You were abundant too small, and he--I don't know for what cause [i]or[/i] reason but sexless though he was, it must have been a he--was plenteous too large. What you could diocese were ten closely grooved labyrinths, with radial marks notching their spreading wave patterns and pulling irregularly at their circumferences like drawstrings. Roughly at the center of each of these was the fingertip's eyeball: the same thumb and fingerprints that marked the organ of visions of the sightless, near-peering profiles upon the opposite wall.

Here was a fable of embodiment, move rounded away from the iconic sightedness of the image back to the indexical touch of the drawing material part its imprint, its projection, and its enlargement. at no time mind arte povera, from which the artist had emerg back in the late 1960s; the time was an expanded now, and the sign of the time was a black-and-white photograph. Rovesciare I propri occhi (To turn upside down One's Eyes), 1970, showing the artist, more or les his actual size, with mirroring contact lense upon which the reduced image of the photographer was caught twice, creating the result of a cat's slitted pupils, transforming Penone's gaze into that of a preternatural being, touched in the blinded organ of visions the retinas turned inside on the outside to confront the internal dark of the material part to which they belonged. Then there was Fronte (Forehead), 1997 with the same creased forehead, from which dirtied tape had been flayed away to make an imprint, end which light had been shone turning imprint into protection projection, growing it to the size of the wall, and transforming the negative of the skin crease into the positive of the line and back again into the negative of the light-traced space, emerging between the trails of the drawing hand. Blinded drawing and sighted photography (and vice versa), guarded through the physical weave, the warp and weft of the imprint, each the inside-out of the other, negative-positive, each to each other the inverted residue of the skin of the material substance where it comes into contact with the sable matter of the world. And then traced with thorns, and the spaces between them, that move rounded the puncta of sight into the punctilia of touch.