The trees inside

"Cedro di Versailles" at the AGO
"Ripetere il Bosco" is also visible
on the right hand wall in this picture

We visited the recently reconstructed AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) in Toronto last Friday, its transformation masterminded by Frank Gehry, and in the Galleria Italia on Level 2 we were impressed by a remarkable installation called Ripetere il Bosco (Repeating the Forest), by Guiseppe Penone.

Planks of wood, attached to the high inner walls of the spacious gallery, had been painstakingly chiselled out, exposing the form of the young tree it had originally come from. Presumably the message is that the tree itself is still there, to those who know how to look for it within a man made wooden artefact.

My artwork shows [...] the essence of matter and tries to reveal [...] the hidden life within.

In March last year Penone, struggling with a language that's not his own, gave a recorded talk at the AGO:

I take a big beam ... I start to carve the beam following a ring of growing ... and I arrive to find the form of the tree... I do several times because each beam is from a different tree [with a] different history. I make evident the tree that is in the wood that surrounds us.

Penone discovering the inner tree

In his intimate dealings with trees dead and alive, he imagines that ...

The space between the tree and the bark is the future time of the tree ...

Born in the alps near Turin, Penone is a member of the Italian Arte Povera group, creating sculpture from easy to find, ordinary materials, rather than from rare, costly marble and such things. Even so, I couldn't help remembering what Michelangelo did with blocks of marble towards the end of his life. Those were sculptures of emerging forms as well.

By the way, while searching for another link to Giuseppe Penone I came across a blog published regularly since 2005: Some Landscapes. These illustrated comments on the theme of landscapes as depicted in the arts are written (compulsively, I imagine) by "Plinius"—who likes that nom de blog—from Stoke Newington. I thoroughly recommend browsing through it.