Giuseppe Penone: Hands - Earth - Light - Colors

Inspired by the gestures and actions in Cocci, two decades later in 2004-05, Penone undertook a similar process: creating larger plaster shapes tracing the imprint of the hand, substituting children’s wooden blocks for vessel fragments, and casting the blocks into steel. With the plaster shapes in bronze, and the wooden blocks in steel, Geometria nelle mani (Geometry in the Hands), 2005, was created. A series of five sculptures on view here, they contain a memory of Cocci. Their seemingly natural bronze surfaces resemble human imprints and are juxtaposed with stainless steel geometries, creating a dialectic of forms. Within each of the sculptures lies a hidden complexity: a small void of the same shape as the wooden block through which we’re able to glimpse the artist’s hand — the principle of creation at the heart of Penone’s practice.

In a group of early works from 1970-1973, Coincidenza di immagini (Images Coincidence) and Svolgere la propria pelle (To Unroll One’s Skin), photographs of a part of the body correlate to ink prints of their respective skin areas establishing a relationship between the visual representation and the perception of touch, and revealing the richness of the image of the skin. These works suggest that the physical encounter with the universe is more profound than the experience of it through sight.

In his most recent works, a series titled Impronte di Luce (Imprints of Light), 2023, Penone turns to painting, exploring gesture and imprint in an entirely new context. In each of these works gestures of the hands imprinted on paper with ink are enlarged and transported onto canvas to create colorful compositions. The brilliantly hued colors of the background of the canvases are derived from Le Corbusier’s ‘architectural polychromy,’ a chromatic palette of 63 colors formulated in 1931 and enriched in 1959. Each canvas has the proportions of a 183 x 183 cm perfect square, inspired by the ‘Modulor,’ Le Corbusier’s anthropometric system of proportions and measurements based on the golden ratio.

Installed on the wall and suspended by a steel cable are the works from Avvolgere la terra - il colore nelle mani (To Enfold the Earth – the colour of the hands), 2014, each formed by enlarging a handful of clay bearing the imprint of the artist’s hands, and revealing that imprint in terracotta and pigments of red, light pink, blue, and yellow.