Golden Emptiness: Spazio di Luce
The
exhibition of Giuseppe Penone at Whitechapel Gallery focuses on one
installation Spazio di Luce. It
presents a bronze cast of a tree, segmented and laid out horizontally in the
exhibition space. The trunk rests on its own branches.
First
of all, the work impresses with the dynamism of its shapes and textures. Golden
light lures the gaze inside. Then the viewer's attention switches to the
complexity of meanings transmitted. The artist himself explains that the use of
gold sheets inside the empty bronze cast refers to the idea of gold as the
representation of sunlight since ancient times. The telescopic cast of the tree
trunk allows a view through the whole installation, revealing the interplay of
light and shadow. Penone has intentionally cut out some casts of the branches
to let the light in through resulting holes.
This
way, the tree consists of two surfaces: an inner golden layer, the aim of which
is to provide aesthetic pleasure and provoke curiosity, and the external bronze
'bark' that carries the traces of natural growth and artistic recast.
Giuseppe
Penone creates a luxurious object that has an obvious aesthetic as well as
material value. But this work is also a result of a collaborative activity of
the people involved in making of a wax cast from the real tree trunk. As a
consequence, the bark of the bronze tree is covered with their fingerprints. The
work combines a strong visual statement with an elaborated philosophic
expression of interaction between nature and society.
Only
after becoming a cultural object is the tree eligible for appropriation of the
gallery space. It needed to overcome its 'raw' stage to become
involved into collaboration between the natural and the cultural and to embody
the artist's idea of unity.
The
installation Spazio di Luce extends
through the ascetic exhibition space. Its inner shine attracts the viewer, while
the projecting branches do not allow a close approach; in a way they attack
him. This work contains a profound contradiction of the relation between
humanity and nature, an eternal struggle between a wish to integrate and a lack
of contact.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/the-bloomberg-commission-giuseppe-penone-spazio-di-luce
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