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A tree towers upwards in Kensington Gardens, slender but unimaginably strong, grey boulders perched like vultures among its branches. Another gestures directly to the sky, twigs spreading in eloquent appeal. A third can be seen at great distance, shattered as if by lightning, its broken glory shining bright cold in the sunshine.
For one exhilarating moment it seemed as if the acclaimed Italian artist Giuseppe Penone had come upon these trees and simply adjusted them, with poetic ingenuity, to emphasise their exceptional strength and beauty. Then, just as viewers were discussing how miraculous trees are – everyone stunned, everyone photographing this radiant glade – someone knocked on a trunk. And we heard the hollow ring of cast bronze.
Penone’s obsession with trees is lifelong. Born in northern Italy in 1947, the youngest of the arte povera generation, he has been praising the roots, twigs and branches, the sap, leaves and the magnificent anatomy of trees through his art for more than five decades. Inside Serpentine South are the latest offshoots of a series dating all the way back to the late 1960s, titled Alberi (Trees).
Penone discovers the shape of a young tree in industrially cut beams of cedar, larch and fir, using his deep knowledge of wood growth, rings and knots. He carves away until a new sapling seems to grow out of the mature wood. A sawn treeis recut by the artist so that it turns back into a tree again – in this case emerging from a sheaf of beams spreading like pages across the gallery wall. Penone calls this marvellous sculpture Book Trees.
If the sincerity of his passion has never been in doubt, the means of expression are oddly variable, however, in this show. It is as if the real trees outside, frothing with spring blossom, running in avenues all the way across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, have somewhat stifled his ambition.
That trees give the world oxygen is such a wonder that the heap of privet leaves on the floor, upon which Penone once lay to breathe (his indentation of his presence scarcely detectable), feels like the merest homage. Nor can the long cloth that winds slowly from one gallery into the next, upon which he has written a long tract in Italian, convey even the smallest part of a sapling’s beguilingly gradual growth.
Trees are so sculptural, moreover, that the analogy seems almost superfluous. Cast-bronze figures twisting out of pots, wreathed with Green Man-style foliage, are alas borderline kitsch. And bark rubbings, interspersed with leaf prints, used to depict a vast unfurling forest in one gallery – trees making trees – is a beautiful idea but with underpowered results.
At the heart of this show is a gallery devoted to the exceptional gift that trees confer upon the world, as upon the human race. You smell it before you even enter. Hundreds of thousands of laurel leaves are packed, behind twine, all over every inch of the central rotunda, like a vast green cell. The scent is fresh and familiar. And crowning the whole installation is a cast of a human lung sprouting a golden bough, a lyrical vision of the oxygen of life passing from the outer air through the body’s blood.
Penone can be so lyrical, and so epigrammatic, as this work shows. He can work on immense and intimate scales. There is a small tree in this exhibition, for instance, that is exactly matched to the artist’s conceit. It is real: a young sapling thriving in a pot that holds a small black and white photograph of the artist in its branches. Or rather, the eyes in the photograph are speared through with fine twigs. Penone’s gaze, you might say, is forever fixed upon – held by – trees. It is a perfect self-portrait of the artist.
There is a fabled tree in the National Gallery’s exhibition of the Mexican painter José María Velasco (1840-1912), its first show by a Latin American artist. Crowds of bright green arms rise sharply upwards, like stalagmites, towards the sky. Far below stands a small human figure for scale. This is the majestic giant cardón cactus the artist saw in the state of Oaxaca in 1887. It fills the frame, a botanical study that became an iconic painting for an independent nation.
Velasco was a polymath: a trained painter and naturalist. His landscapes are so meticulously observed, you can rely upon them for data: the precise form of a gigantic rock in the valley of Mexico, the exact shape of a snow-capped volcano beneath blazing blue skies. Lake Chalco, seen through his eyes in 1885, has a foreground distractingly thick with the floating vegetation that was once home to native salamanders.
His art appears indivisible from these landscapes. Velasco is not trying to impress you with his distinctive brushwork, or to impose his own idiom on the geography of Mexico. You would not necessarily recognise his style independent of these panoramic vistas of red rock, dry brush and soaring mountains. And, like Ruskin, painting the complex formation of gneiss rock at the same time, Velasco can be fastidiously geologically faithful.
It would be hard to imagine him painting a portrait, for instance. Indeed there is no obvious goatherd in a small painting of that title, and in his celebrated Valley of Mexico, a massive vista stretching all the way across lakes and seas to high peaks beneath far-distant skies, the two figures in the foreground are all too easily overlooked.
But at his best, Velasco has a gift for discovering the ancient in the modern, and vice versa. The most captivating work here is a small painting of what appear to be twin peaks – an Aztec pyramid, rhyming with the sun-baked mountain in the distance. Far away is a tiny plume of white smoke, as if a train was passing.
Star ratings (out of five)
Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots ★★★
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico ★★★
Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots is at the Serpentine South Gallery, London, until 7 September
