Garden of the Meridan

The view is interrupted and the artist’s body becomes a volume, shaped into a sculpture through the projection of the gaze. Self-blinded, he has the chance to record images that are not, in this case, the result of individual selection. Via the gaze, the artist’s body is offered “to the collective imagination” through its visionary abilities. The images his eyes register are immediately projected outward, directed toward others without manipulation. In his Sguardo vegetale / Vegetal Gaze ceramic photographs, the action is based on specific shared references, including the very idea of sculpture, the idea of prophetic blindness established in myth, and last but not least, the documentary ability ascribed to the photographic medium. Once again, the plant becomes a search for light, fundamental to its very existence, as in the projection of the gaze that constitutes Spazio di luce / Space of Light and Equivalenza / Equivalence.

 

An economy of gestures generates sculpture; swirling around a point provides the concentration of space needed for the sculpture.

I rely on a form with concentric lines that screw into space and matter.

The need to escape the friction that brakes the wind of action creates the sculpture, the animal gesture of a vertical tree, the sculptor’s plant gesture.

The sculptor’s action is diluted around the tree’s gesture; the tree’s action is restrained in the sculptor’s plant gesture.

Around the sculpture,

around the sculptor,

boxwood, laurel, myrtle, olive trees.

Giuseppe Penone

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