Giuseppe Penone: Time Keeps Watch
Taking the exhibition Anafora at Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto as a starting point, a reflection on the relationship between matter, nature, and time in Giuseppe Penone’s work. Trees, imprints, and processes of growth reveal a conception of sculpture as a practice of listening and engaging with matter, in a ceaseless movement of return to the origin.
The elementary idea, the symbolic form of the tree, verticality, the stele, the first and simplest idea of vitality, of culture, of sculpture, we find above all in forests of conifers: pines, firs, larches, cedars.
They are the purest stelae, the forms that shoot with the greatest tension from the ground to the clouds.
It is the conifers that best recall, in their matter, the structure of the tree evolving toward a perfect and dry synthesis.
Giuseppe Penone, 1976
Taking the exhibition Anafora at Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto as a starting point, a reflection on the relationship between matter, nature, and time in Giuseppe Penone’s work. Trees, imprints, and processes of growth reveal a conception of sculpture as a practice of listening and engaging with matter, in a ceaseless movement of return to the origin.
Tree, skin, breath, growth, contact. Giuseppe Penone starts again from nature and its cycles to build a sculptural practice situated at the intersection of matter and time.
In his work, nothing is treated as a means of extracting meaning or achieving a formal effect. On the contrary, woodland densities, trees, stones, streams speak an already autonomous language, one that asks, first and foremost, to be listened to, crossed, kept company with.
Rather than shaping matter, Penone adopts a strategy to understand its reason for being all the way down. In this process, time, in its duration, interruption and becoming, turns into an ally of artistic action.
“I feel the forest breathing, / I hear the slow, inexorable growth of wood…” he wrote in one of his texts. Matter is already a sculptor, of an automatic, involuntary, constant sculpture. Practice will make itself complicit in this process, in a continuous crossing and a continuous revelation of its gestation.
In the series Albero porta, this dynamic is more explicit than ever: the tree’s growth rings become a map to trace the genealogy of the adult specimen back to its origin, carved out of the fiber that has grown around it over the years.
This exaltation of biological time and its necessity reappears in one of the most celebrated actions in the history of Arte Povera: Alpi Marittime: Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point).
Penone grasps the trunk of a young tree and attaches a bronze cast of his hand to it. The tree grows, engulfing the hand and deforming around that foreign body. The artist makes legible the shaping force of an encounter, of a gesture, and of the response that gesture has met.
During my recent visit to Penone’s exhibition in the historic rooms of Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, I thought how splendidly the title Anafora fits his poetics. In literature, anaphora is the rhetorical figure of repetition par excellence, where every development of discourse remains trapped in the matrix of an attestation.
To go forward in order to return to the origin. To explore in order to find oneself at the same point of departure. I believe Giuseppe Penone’s operation can be condensed into this exact movement, as in the Homeric nostoi: trials, experiments in contact, circles that never quite close.
Over all things, time keeps watch.
Roberta Bertozzi
This critical note follows a press visit to Anafora, an exhibition curated by Saverio Verini (27 June 2026 – 10 January 2027).
Installed in the historic rooms of the Piano Nobile at Palazzo Collicola, the exhibition places Penone’s sculptures in dialogue with the architecture of the palazzo, establishing a close relationship between the interior spaces and the surrounding landscape.
The project was developed in collaboration between the Festival dei Due Mondi and the Musei Civici di Spoleto.
Giuseppe Penone | Il tempo veglia | Time Keeps Watch
A critical note by Roberta Bertozzi
IG roberta.bertozzi ↗︎