Versailles garden

The five hour walk with the Cised group in the Versailles Gardens and Park proved delightful despite the grey skies. Minimal crowds, perhaps deterred by the cool, wet weather, made for a leisurely pace.

Though defiantly the garden of Andre Le Notre a wonderful contemporary ambience infiltrates with the works of Giuseppe Penone. He articulately states:

“Being given the possibility of letting my work dialogue with that of Le Nôtre in Versailles is a great privilege. The garden is an emblematic place which sums up Western thought on the relationship between man and nature. 

Laid out to exalt the power of one man, it underlines the force and power of nature which minimises man’s action, requiring unceasing maintenance work to preserve it. 

The complexity of the garden’s design suggests the multiple ways of seeing it, and its extension and grandiose aspect contrast with the tiny dimensions of the person walking around it. The individual disappears in the garden, to be subsumed into the mind of the human grouping which generated such an organisation of nature. 

My work provokes a similar thought in me: the objective mimicry of the works cancels out my action as sculptor and concentrates the attention on the extraordinary intelligence of plant growth and on the perfect aesthetic choices present in nature.” 

His statement reflects much of the walking experience. Ghosts are the persistence of the past into the presence. Whenever in Europe I see the ghosts clearly ... wondering if they see me ... ghosts are the momentary manifestations of things that persist and wait to be embodied again at specific moments by specific individuals.

Walking in the Gardens and Park generated a hospitality of ephemeral yet rooted nature ...

:: Note ::  walking is good for the sole ...