The photographs on show in the mezzanine room of this massive gallery – an engine room of sorts, from which the works of Richard Long branch off to the left, and those of Guiseppe Penone’s lie to its right – are typical of a disturbance made by both artists: the muddying of the boundaries between the use of ideas in art, and the use of materials.
A diptych showing a steel cast of Penone’s hand gripping the trunk of a young tree, and the same tree ten years later, now bulging where it has been forced to deviate from its natural line (‘Alpi Marittime’ 1967-78), introduces the type of slippery natural world-conceptualism that comes to characterise Penone’s own practice, and resonates with the land works of Long.
Penone’s two related bodies of work here display a surprising lightness of touch for an artist usually associated with Arte Povera’s bulky, monumental materialism. A suite of black graphite drawings, ‘Pelle di grafite’ (2003-8), depicts tiny patches of the artist’s skin. The scale of this soon wavers, and the fragile patterns equally morph to look like expanses of parched riverbed or aerial images of the earth’s cracked covering. This indexical gesture is echoed with Penone’s installation of heavy, sculptural slabs made by kneading thick wax into the bark of a cedar tree and casting the plant’s negatives in bronze.
Comprising new works from Spain, Switzerland and China, Long’s now familiar landscape walks take a fresh turn in these vast galleries and monster vinyl texts, unleashing a new, very human, aspect of Long’s practice. The sense of estrangement and imposition felt in the face of these elemental words – ‘moon’, ‘ocean’ or ‘north’ – is staggering. Not only are these works the fleeting stuff of thought and consideration, their physical scale also produces considerable effects.