- Venue
- Haunch Of Venison
- Location
- London
There are artists you come across, all creatures big and small, that after you’ve seen them the once, you’ve pretty much digested all they have to bring to the table. You get the T shirt but don’t bother going back. The experience is arguably closer to Satiation rather than passion. Passion in my book keeps you wanting more and more and more. It’s not that you’re not satisfied with each encounter. But the thought of the next meeting gets your juices going.
Penone’s work for me does just that. I’m a long term fan and as such over recent years have been lucky enough to take in his tour de force show at MACBA, his more modest appetizer at Ikon and now this cracker of a show at Haunch of Venison. Each exposure has been a rich and fulfilling experience and the repetition of work sightings rather than bringing disappointment brings one ever closer to a sense of awe. If the term deceptively simple was ever to be applied to an artist then this is a classic illustration of its good use. But these works are far from simple. Akin to good poetry which says the most with the least possible words, as the saying goes.
One room is devoted to a sequence of impressive graphite stick on black canvas drawing. Natural forms evocative of a twisting woodland setting intertwine to form a shimmering undulating field of marks. In itself each mark is nothing special, but collectively they sing loud and proud. These large wall sized works are immaculately sensual and allow you to become swallowed into a field of Zen like calm. This trade mark ‘Povera’ commitment to making the extraordinary out of the ordinary, and this non egotistical approach to art making is embedded across the show.
A clumsy and almost silly looking assemblage of twigs supporting a layered arrow like form reveals itself to be cast bronze, but still manages to retain its low art associations. It gives the experience of encountering joyful deception, rather than being smugly conned. One of his trademark peeled back trees is placed on the stairwell and presents a joyous dissection of a natural element. This revelatory aspect is a core strand to all the works. It gives the viewer something to take away from the show, something that even if they kind of knew already, they are still the better off for being reminded.
Showing in equal large amounts is a lovely selection of Richard Longs text works, beautifully and quite literally writ large onto the gallery walls. These take you on a displaced and meditative immersion into the secondary extension of Longs primary experience. They are formally sensual and the scale and placement enables and altogether different encounter with the power of the written word. They also manage to achieve this whilst always acknowledge that the action and the anecdote are never to be confused as one and the same. As such Long is arguably the king of anti sentimental landscape. Which is in my book arguably still the big problem facing anyone who deals with natural landscape as core subject.
There is also a classic Richard Long stone circle on show, which you would think could easily bore one as a viewer considering quite how many I’ve seen over the years. But each one rewards. Each offers more than the sum of its parts and each manages to exude a difference to its antecedents. A difference (to quote Barthes) only repeatable as a difference. Both Artists are seminal in their status. Both sit well together in their understatement. Both filled me to the core yet looking for to the next encounter. Well worth the visit.
