74 - Giuseppe Penone (Italian, 1947)

Giuseppe Penone (Italian, 1947) Vladimir Majakowskij - Oblako v stanach -1994 Tree sap on cotton with embroidery, rock crystal 33 x 18 x 18 cm Provenance: Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne (Basel Art Fair, 2001) The Robert and Suzanne Pannier Collection, Bruges With a photocertificate by the artist, dated 12 July 2001. Giuseppe Penone's works from the 1990s frequently explore the relationship between natural processes and forms of human expression. In this group of works, the artist created casts of tree trunks split lengthwise, drawing attention to the unexpected affinity between wood and books: the layered fibres of a tree recalling the stacked pages of a volume, while both can be understood as forms of accumulated time and memory. The original idea for these works involved placing actual books between the two halves of the cast trunk, but this proved technically unsatisfactory. Penone chose to replace the book with a folded piece of white cloth, arranged so that its edge evokes the spine of a book. Along this edge, the title of a literary work, often a poem, is embroidered in white thread, transforming the book no longer physically present, into a subtle presence within the sculpture. In Vladimir Majakovskij - Oblako v stanach (1994), Penone refers to Vladimir Mayakovsky's celebrated poem A Cloud in Trousers, written in 1914–15 and regarded as one of the key works of Russian Futurist poetry. The title, embroidered on the folded cloth, recalls the poem's striking juxtaposition of opposing states: the immaterial and the physical, the monumental and the personal.