Giuseppe Penone. 'Albero di 12 m', 1970. Legno, cm 1213x25. Courtesy Moderna Museet, StockholmIt is a long life, art. Penone did beautiful deconstructions of trees in the 1970s, cutting away tree rings to reveal the young tree inside a massive trunk. Recent work, a series at Versailles in 2013, is still about trees, but there is bronze, there are castings, there are interventions in how a tree grows, there is Versailles and its Le Nȏtre landscape, there isn't much povera any more, other than the insistence that trees grow and resist sculptural intentions. Weather intervenes; the cast tree bark is from a cedar that grew at Versailles, damaged by a storm. And as we in the boreal forest know, beetles and climate do more to shape the environment than any number of landscape architects and gardeners. There is an existential reality to trees – the remaking of trees/nature in the image of the divinity of man is what Penone has always resisted.
Giuseppe Penone, Tra scorza e scorza, Entre écorce et écorce, 2003. Courtesy of Giuseppe Penone. Photo by Tadzio