Sinapsi sensoriali del disegno. Tatto, impronta e conoscenza incarnata nei disegni di Giuseppe Penone

Elena Trevisan

doi:10.26375/disegno.18.2026.12

Authors

Elena Trevisan Dipartimento di Culture del progetto, Università Iuav di Venezia https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6040-587X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26375/disegno.18.2026.12

Keywords:

Giuseppe Penone, drawing, imprint, touch, analogy, embodied knowledge

Abstract

This essay investigates the role of drawing in Giuseppe Penone’s work, considering it not as a preparatory or ancillary practice in relation to sculpture, but as an autonomous device of knowledge. Through the analysis of significant nuclei within his graphic corpus –from the references to Chauvet and Leonardo to Sulla punta delle dita, Rovesciare i propri occhi, Palpebre, Pressione, Propagazioni, and Paesaggio del cervello– the article shows how drawing operates as a site of relation between body, matter, and perception. The notion of analogy makes it possible to read the morphological continuity between natural and bodily forms, while touch and imprint shift the cognitive process beyond the primacy of vision. In Penone’s works, the surface is not a passive limit, but an active threshold: skin, paper, wall, and skull become sites of registration, emergence, and transformation of the mark. Drawing thus appears as an embodied practice, capable of making visible correspondences that are normally imperceptible and of restoring to representation an epistemic function. From this perspective, Penone’s graphic work is configured as a sensory and relational field in which contact produces form and the mark becomes the trace of thought in action.

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