Elsewhere in the London gallery, the artist has installed an entire wall made of wire mesh cages filled with laurel leaves (Respirare l’ombra, 2008), as a way to bring the forest inside the gallery and fill the space with scent. Also on display are three casts of a tree intervention: Penone attached a cast of his arm to a young tree, and allowed the trunk to grow around it, fixing it there permanently. He then made three casts of the whole thing after six, eight and twelve years; in essence, the same three casts are being shown together here, an installation that makes time, growth and the presence of human in nature visible. As Penone has said, “a form without a human gesture is a collective present; with a gesture, it is an individual present.” So what inserts the individual into the facelessness of society and the timelessness of Nature is human gesture, which, in this case, is embodied by the artist’s own hand.

The Paris segment of the show takes this concept of the artist being present through his touch even further, with sculptural objects that literally bear the marks of the hand that made them. Fist-sized chunks of squeezed clay cover a 4.5-metre-wide set of iron panels (Terre, 2015), while enlarged versions of the same gesture draw attention to the finger markings, effort and movement that made these objects possible (Avvolgere la terra – il colore delle mani, 2014). A simple sheet of pure gold was crushed and placed on a plaster pedestal (Spoglia d’oro, 2001), again as the remnant of an action that cannot be separated from the person who executed it. For Penone, his hands express the movements of the universe; therefore a plain squeezed ball of clay is the result of a process of cosmic proportions. In his own words: “in a simple handful of clay we have the synthesis of a universal form.” Thus terracotta, the handcrafted material par excellence since the beginning of humanity, becomes both the paper and the ink that document human artifice, in an intertwined dance of human and non-human, knowledge and mystery, action and stillness.