Manlio Brusatin
Slight Tragedy with a Finale in Flowers
 
in “Italienische Leidenschaft",
catalogue of the exhibition (Galerie Niedlich, Stuttgart)
Stuttgart, 1983
 

Maurizio Pellegrin’s images will need to travel, whistling a happy tune that cleverly echoes a famous musical piece, and little by little begins to sound like the tragic and involving musical notes of the murderer of Monster of Düsseldorf by Fritz Lang (subtitle: Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder). And this improvised tune will serve to animate the simple and distressing notes that spark from the artist’s little pianos, little trains, little airplanes, little ships that “…don’t know how to sail”, as one would say. Instead they are brought to life, they travel blue-blond skies and pink seas, turning and turning their small propellers and their pistons, releasing the joy of being liberated with the triumphant and war-like hiss…of a coffee machine boiling at the beginning of a daily adventure.
Triumphing in Maurizio Pellegrin’s charcoal drawings are large, stuffed one-dimensional heroes with pin-heads, like a porcupine, that inflate with air like kites at a gust of wind, stretched in their telescopic feet and in their “heated” bellies, with charged and inert sexual tensions, self-contemplative like public sins.
The position of their lips and the cigarettes in their mouthpieces is a “vision of the world” that they pursue like a mission and end up tragically living “without a fold”…
Here there is a maze of hidden desires, a refuge of narratives and adventures that speak to their eyes, lips and hearts, like something great and child-like that can be discovered in Emilio Salgari and Karl May’s stories, but that one torturously flees to in the dust of extraneous ceilings and of animated overcoats, like in Gustav Meyrink’s Golem. In contact with thumbs, the passport emanates green sparkles, and the photograph is like the video of an angry television set.
In his drawings, Maurizio employs the charcoal of a lit fire, always more essential and delineated, and the tenacious, poisonous colors of the work compose themselves with refractions from black lights. A triumphant and hallucinating transposition of the eyes, aimed for heroes that disappear like the Masked Man and conquer an anonymous identity with stuffed shoulders and brains because they are brought to life, they are living….
In Maurizio’s works, the journeys of the charcoal are extended to the edges of the canvas that sustains them. However, one senses that similar marks surface under a layer of white were recently cancelled to make room for other emblems so identical and so insanely contrary “as if nothing would have happened”…
The importance of things that aren’t important has been transcribed over everything, like an Egyptian scribe that has transcribed too many stories and looks up from below his newly sculptured obelisk that must be levelled because new things and new stories occurred only when it was written. The same also happens in our super-informalized age, which wants to be contemporary at its own risk. In the end, it wants to renounce everything, pushing the red button that cancels the slow voices of an old song in order to inscribing a new song, consumed in the here and now in order to become ours, over the record tracks.
Wanting to exit from these images, one mustn’t forget that at first the happy tune mocked Grieg’s famous piece, and that it will magically and happily resound the jukebox and old organs together with shattered desires. In the meanwhile, ships full of coffee cups, trains, kites and small flowers dance on port docks, …one for you, one for me, one for you…