Giuseppe Penone: Drawing Center, New York

Beginning of article

GIUSEPPE PENONE

DRAWING CENTER, NEW YORK

KIKI SMITH

MOMA QNS, NEW YORK

Fable I: "Giuseppe Penone: The Imprint of Drawing." In the anteroom of the Drawing Center, a giant barred the way, buried up to his eyebrows, from which his colossal forehead, its worry lines traced by thorns, emerged aboveground. Never mind the crown of thorns; for me that gargantuan tracery called up Briar Rose's thicket. For it was hard to see the forehead for the forest of finger-pricking points. Indeed, it wasn't until later that I knew Penone's Spine d'acacia (fronte) (Acacia Thorns [Forehead]), 2002, was a forehead at all. Stand to the side, as I did, approaching gingerly, and all you saw was that spiky copse, daring you to touch, to feel instead of see, and then fall under the somatic sway of a world in which you were suddenly so impossibly small as to be blind to the gestalt of everything around you. You became like a fly, crawling across a spine-sprouting surface so expansive as to require a map for its traversal--except here the surface was its own map and the fly could not read it. Stepping away from the side, you began to grow and see something develop: not forms, nor directions through the prickly maze, but a cursive swoop here and a springing are there--gradually you became aware that those linear fragments might be huge, stray hairlines. Step farther away and orient yourself less sidelong to the spiky surface, and growing more you began to be aware of openings, clearings, paths through the spiny woods: the fissures between rows and clumps of thorns, the …