Giuseppe Penone Respirer l'ombre

“Respirer l’ombre is the part devoted to the language of the surprising dialogue with what we call nature, which the artist began more than thirty-five years ago, and which is mainly made up of gestures. It is a dialogue that is always mezzo voce: Penone’s awareness of a brotherhood with stones or plants (he knows, like Klee, that man “is nature, a piece of nature in the area of nature”), his relaxed familiarity with Antiquity (isn’t Italy the country where the history of art takes the place of history? ) makes him converse as an equal with the tree and the stream, and with their tutelary deities (borrowed mainly from the Greco-Roman pantheon, but here and there an exotic god is invited). Respirer l’ombre can be read as a collection of mythical stories, of founding parables, without the slightest trace of pathos or grandiloquence; the myth takes on the appearance of the haiku dear to Roland Barthes, and Renoue’s texts speak of the hidden things and the beginnings of the world with precision.”