DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE?

Anne and I have an annual visit to Versailles - the first year it was Murakami in winter 2010, then Joanna Vaconcelos in August last year. Remember? A contemporary artist is invited to create something within the chateau and in the gardens every year....

http://discovmaggsie.blogspot.fr/2012/08/come-with-me-to-versailles.html

This year a totally different event. Guiseppe Penone. Italian, rather handsome in my books.

Beaubourg

 I had discovered him at the beginning of this new century, first at the Beaubourg,

Tuileries L'arbre des voyelles de G. Penone

then I practically fell on top of a tree in the Tuileries Gardens. 






Before going on, the weather was something like Autumn with changing skies which made the sculptures look even more dramatic.



Now let the artist speak.


“Being given the possibility of letting my work dialogue with that of Le Nôtre in Versailles is a great privilege. The garden is an emblematic place which sums up Western thought on the relationship between man and nature.
Laid out to exalt the power of one man, it underlines the force and power of nature which minimises man’s action, requiring unceasing maintenance work to preserve it.
The complexity of the garden’s design suggests the multiple ways of seeing it, and its extension and grandiose aspect contrast with the tiny dimensions of the person walking around it. The individual disappears in the garden, to be subsumed into the mind of the human grouping which generated such an organisation of nature.
My work provokes a similar thought in me: the objective mimicry of the works cancels out my action as sculptor and concentrates the attention on the extraordinary intelligence of plant growth and on the perfect aesthetic choices present in nature.”
Giuseppe Penone

Well, if you did get through that, Bravo. I found it a bit  «heavy going" and what is so surprising about the text, he says nothing how he sculpts his trees.

When I first saw him in Beaubourg with Gianni, I understood the mechanism. But then I did have a very voluble Italian telling me a story. I was silent and stayed that way!

So, I knew what to expect at Versailles. I gather there were «trees» inside the Chateau as well. We didn’t bother with those. All these were beautiful enough.


Have you guessed what they are made of? No? Wait a minute please. The number of people who just walked past without taking them in, or turning to look, suprised me .... Is it possible when you see this? 


Or this? 











Apparently so.....

However, I am sorry that we didn’t look closer at these....I think we both imagined that they were blocks of cement.

Space of light 2008

and see the people who just walked by

 

Given up? Well they are in bronze and some weigh over 1300 kilos. Take your breath away?

Sky seconds later ....

I wonder what it will be next year......