Hall of the Emperors

This hall contains two works that, using different materials and processes, nevertheless share a convergence of experiences from previous works, focusing on speech, breath, and contact.

In Soffio di foglie / Breath of Leaves, Penone piles up real leaves and lies down on the pile, leaving behind a cast of his body. Turning his head to one side, he exhales. When he gets back up again, he has left behind an imprint of both his body and breath in the leaves.

In To Breath the Shadow, a conical shadow cast by a human body materializes in a grid of bronze laurel leaves. The body generating the flared silhouette is evoked as a negative; the detail of the lungs and tracheal tube make a sculpture in the round, once again created by interweaving laurel leaves cast in bronze, this time gold-coated: laurel the mythological plant, gold a mineral the human organism does not reject. The shadow of the foliage and shadow within the lungs, between oxygen-producing leaves and the lungs breathing in that oxygen, between lung cavities and empty spaces that allow the sculpture-generating process of casting, are all strong relationships.

On a par with a gesture like Pluto’s hand on Proserpine’s flesh, the pressure of breath has the ability to alter shape.

 

Breathing is automatic, involuntary sculpture that most closely brings us to osmosis with things. An action that erases the envelope, the skin-given identity, as an element penetrating another body – the issue of breath, of breathing – every breath contains within itself the principle of fertilization, testifying to such in this form. 

Giuseppe Penone

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