GIUSEPPE PENONE

For its annual contemporary art event, from 11 June to 31 October 2013, the Palace of Versailles hosts works by Italian artist GIUSEPPE PENONE, a major figure within arte povera.
His tree sculptures are set in the French style gardens of Le Nôtre and in the Palace itself, creating a dialogue with the geometric architecture and the complex structure of the gardens.

Being given the possibility of letting my work dialogue with that of Le Nôtre in Versailles is a great privilege. The garden is an emblematic place which sums up Western thought on the relationship between man and nature.

Laid out to exalt the power of one man, it underlines the force and power of nature which minimises man’s action, requiring unceasing maintenance work to preserve it.

The complexity of the garden’s design suggests the multiple ways of seeing it, and its extension and grandiose aspect contrast with the tiny dimensions of the person walking around it. The individual disappears in the garden, to be subsumed into the mind of the human grouping which generated such an organisation of nature.

My work provokes a similar thought in me: the objective mimicry of the works cancels out my action as sculptor and concentrates the attention on the extraordinary intelligence of plant growth and on the perfect aesthetic choices present in nature.

Giuseppe Penone

IDEE DI PIETRA
2010