The Brooklyn Rail

What if the hand and sense of touch were accorded the same prominence in our daily experience as the eye? At Marian Goodman, Giuseppe Penone pursues this question across a variety of media in works spanning his fifty-year career, during which he’s developed a practice in sculpture based on casting and excavation, and in painting on rubbings and prints.

Unlike sight, which is constrained by edges of objects and the limits of the visual field, touch is relatively unbounded. As Penone has written in a text published by the gallery, “Eyes closed, the hand’s dimensions, which define the surface of contact, extend to limitless tactile sensations.”

Under this tactile regime, time is also fluid. Inspired by the process of natural growth, Penone interweaves and expands upon early works with later variations. Trattenere 6, 8, 12, 16 anni di crescita (Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto) (2004–20), a work conceived in 1968, exalts the power of his hand to constrain the growth of a small tree. Originally documented in photographs, the bronze hand gripping the tree appears here in the form of four tall casts, made over more than a decade, which record the hand’s progressive absorption into the trunk. In an early version of another sequence, Cocci (1979–82), Penone’s cupped hands replace the visual field as he endeavors to hold ceramic fragments in poured plaster. He returns to those primordial sculptural gestures in two subsequent series entitled “Geometria nelle mani.” These involve his hands’ interaction with geometric forms and children’s blocks, as if to absorb, physically, the power of geometric structures such as the Fibonacci sequence and Golden Section that fascinate him in nature. Presented as dark, solarized photographs in Geometria nelle mani – 4 aprile (2004), they invest the simple blocks, gripped in his two hands, with a radioactive glow, juxtaposing their angular rigidity to the muscular flexibility of his fingers.

Scale remains a wild card in this indexical world, and Penone has enlarged five of his solarized photos of hands and blocks to create the massive metal sculptures of Geometria nelle mani (2005), which dominate the front room of the gallery. Here, the imprints of his fingers in cast bronze suggest the rugged surface of asteroids, while the heavy blocks they grip, industrially fabricated in stainless steel, recall the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. All seem tossed wildly in a stormy sea. Within each steel object Penone conceals a cast of his hand holding the original block. Visible through two small orifices that arouse voyeuristic curiosity, the intimately scaled casts stimulate fantasies of the body, linking tactility to childhood memory.

Color would seem to lie beyond the hand’s grasp, but in another surreal extension of Cocci, Avvolgere la terra - il colore nelle mani (2014), Penone proposes a tactile dimension by translating the solarized photos’ mysterious light into pigmented ceramic forms. Suspended from the gallery wall on steel cables, these casts evoke organs brought to light from a grotesque body. For colors, Penone relies on a palette created by Le Corbusier for his architecture, but given that he once made an enlarged drawing of his eyelid, one wonders why he hasn’t gone deeper to explore the surface of his retina, the actual interface of vision and light? Filmmaker Stan Brakhage reproduced “closed-eye vision” by applying paint to his films, but Penone is more restrained, anchoring himself instead in the rigor of Corbusier’s design, inspired by the architect’s extreme geometry and radical use of colored light in late works like the Couvent de la Tourette (1959), where Penone completed a project of rubbings in 2022.

That project, which involved making rubbings, in Corbusier’s colors, from the “skin” of its concrete walls, underlies the labor-intensive paintings of Impronte di luce (2023), the most recent works on view. Installed across the final gallery from Coincidenza di immagini (1970–73), transcriptions of the artist’s body that juxtapose photographs to inked impressions of its surface, Impronte di luce enlarge and playfully recombine similar ink prints made from hands and fingers to suggest tumbling horses, dancers, or swimmers. They evoke the gestural abstraction of Yves Klein’s “Anthropométries,” but in his painting Penone avoids personalized improvisation: his small marks recall the pointillism of Georges Seurat; their colors constrained not by optical theories but by harmonies “found” in Corbusier’s constructed environment. Their format, a 183-centimeter square, replicates the dimensions of Le Corbusier’s “Modulor,” a standardized human figure that rationalizes the process of enlargement. If this meditative reconciliation with architectural order suggests a tempering of the intransigent stance of Arte Povera with the spirituality of quietude, the power of Penone’s work continues to reside in its invocation of irrational forces in the tactile world, and in his capacity for wonder.