His trees will grow on you
Visits the booming Yorkshire Sculpture Park for their new show from arboreal artist
Sculpture parks are quite the thing these days. With the appeal of the sedentary digital life beginning to wane, the pull of “real stuff ” – in this case getting out to look at art in glorious natural surroundings – is proving ever more irresistible. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, founded way back in 1977 and thus the grandaddy of the species, has seen footfall expand radically over the last few years, from 300,000 in 2012-13 to more than 480,000 in 2016-17.
Within its splendid arboreal environs, the tree-obsessed Italian artist Giuseppe Penone feels like the perfect subject for a summer exhibition. Indeed, if “tree-hugger” has become a derisory term for a passionate environmentalist, Penone began his career literally embracing trees in the woods around his home village in the Maritime Alps near Turin. A key figure in Arte Povera – Poor Art – the post-war Italian art movement which aimed to strip art back to its essentials in reaction to mounting consumerism, Penone wanted to integrate his body with the growth patterns of the forest
In Retain 6, 8, 12 Years of Growth, (2004-16), the first work in the indoor part of the exhibition, a cast of one of the artist’s hands grasps a young tree, which responds to his touch by forming a thick growth around it. The process is recorded in bronze casts of the tree at three stages of development.
Reprising a work made in 1968, when Penone was only 21, the piece introduces us to his 50-year love affair with trees, not just as objects of beauty to be portrayed in the traditional sense, but as “perfect sculptures” in their own right, created by light and weather. In his view, they serve as metaphors for human life, with the bark their skin; the branches and twigs their arteries and nervous system. If the latter notion is hardly original, going back to Leonardo and beyond, nevertheless Penone gives it a fresh conceptual twist.
Where the rest of us see doors and tables, Penone senses the tree “imprisoned within” everyday objects. In In the Wood (2008), for instance, he strips a massive, industrially produced larchwood beam back to the spindly sapling at its core, apparently growing from the base of the block.
This process, which embodies for Penone not only the structures of growth, but the passage of time that creates them, reaches a spectacular apogee in the 98ft-long Matrix (2015), a whole pine tree split along its centre, the two halves placed head to head through the length of YSP’s three underground galleries. Partially hollowed out, the curvaceous inner surfaces revealed by the meticulous stripping are wondrous to behold.
Penone enhances this sense of tree-as-body by inserting a fully Shade rounded bronze cast of one of the tree’s inner layers into a section of the trunk, with the stumpy emanations of the partially formed branches giving it a disturbingly torso-like appearance.
This sense of universal layered growth is extended to the artist’s own body with a tiny drawing of one of his fingertips in which the whorls of his skin extend outwards in a vast rippling spiral that fills an entire wall.
The astonishing artistry involved in Penone’s work isn’t in doubt: the ghost-like white tree in Indistinct Borders – Holona (2016), turns out to be painstakingly carved marble, with the bark on the central part of the trunk cast in bronze so life-like you’d expect it to flake off at the touch. Even the work’s reference to Bernini’s 17th-century marble sculpture Apollo and Daphne, in which the nymph is turned into – you guessed it – a tree, makes surprising sense.
Yet somehow I’m not entirely convinced by Penone’s claims to profundity. When his weighty philosophical inferences don’t quite connect with the subject they can feel ponderous. With Eyes Closed (2009), in which his eyes are rendered in thousands of acacia thorns – referencing the Crown of Thorns, of course – feels like a piece of rather corny ecological illustration. And while his essential aesthetic is minimal – if not quite minimalist – he has a weakness for gratuitous add-ons, such as the writhing figures emanating from the bronze bark of Equivalence, which look weirdly amateurish.
There is perhaps something particularly Italian in Penone’s fondness for luxurious materials. Indeed, while I don’t doubt that gold is, as he claims, a substance naturally absorbed by the human body, covering the blasted interior parts of Stricken Tree, a bronze cast of a lightning-struck tree, with gold leaf, doesn’t make one feel more connected to the glories of the surrounding landscape – quite the reverse.
If looking at Penone alone, I might have given this just three stars. But if you’re coming to the park you won’t be focusing solely on this interesting, but ever so slightly flawed artist when you’ve got choice works by the likes of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Anthony Caro dotted through the rolling parkland and wooded glades, and a dream-like installation by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota in the neoclassical chapel. It all adds up to perhaps the best day out in British art.