Palpebre

The installation Palpebre (Eyelids) consists of nineteen drawings that represent a human eyelid. Penone made casts of his own eyelids and then used charcoal to transfer the fine pattern of blood vessels on their insides onto monumental sheets of felt. Eyelids are a recurring motif in his work. In 1978, Penone created an installation in Baden-Baden in which prints of his eyelids were projected at an enormous scale. The thin lines running across his closed eyes resembled a gigantic map of a minuscule part of his body. In the work in De Pont, he has similarly transformed the delicate textures of skin into vast landscapes, thereby revealing the similarity between the surface of the human body and forms found in wide-open nature.

He has connected the individual elements in the installation using small white plaster casts of his own face, marked with his fingerprint. Only when seen close-up does the work reveal its bodily aspect. From a distance, the sum total resembles an organic landscape: a large grey cloud made up of transparent ‘petals’ with marbled veining. Penone draws an explicit parallel between the shape of an eyelid and a natural landscape in which rolling hills present themselves like a series of eyes turned toward the space.

The work is aligned with the central theme of Penone’s oeuvre: a direct, intimate and physical relationship to nature. He approaches the eyelid as a landscape to be explored, just like the ‘infinite landscapes’ of his hand, a fingerprint, a dried leaf or fingernails. For him, the eyelid also represents the fragile boundary between the inner world and the outer reality: a sensitive membrame that registers the outside world through touch and light. When you close your eyes, you project shapes and light against the inside of your eyelids. A person whose eyes are closed has turned their gaze inward – making them better able to look outward when the time comes.