Luigi Meneghelli
The Artwork: Between Appearance and Disappearance
 
in "Italienische Leidenschaft"
catalogue of the exhibition (Gallerie Niedlich, Stuttgart)
Stuttgart, 1983
  

[…] Maurizio Pellegrin seems to reach “diversity”, opening the page of his painting, the laboratory of work on the journey, the plot of the piece. Thus he marks the legs of his trips without ever arriving at any definition, because to define means to limit, to re-enter into the formula, in the circle of knowing. While in this case, it is the knowledge that doesn’t hold, it is the museum that weakens under the pressure of a dizzying line that strings time like a drunken thought or crib-notes reduced to its lowest terms. The first page touches the last and it isn’t the archetype that surfaces, upheld by a precarious sign, but is the sign that looks for its own “archetypity”, an elementary epiphany. However isn't a regression to rudimentary or primitive forms, a return to “cave writing”, but rather of a decided loss of control over graphic devices. It is as if art exercises a sort of contortion, a gymnastics routine in order to cleverly slip beyond informative excesses in order to escape the straight-jacket of daily mythologies. A touch, a fleeting glance, a crossroad, the sign always ends up founding the place of multiplicity and plurality where each figure goes into disguise, in the loss, of identity. A thing is always another thing, an image that not only establishes the idea of assemblage, but the notion of invasion or deportation of sense. Baudrillard would speak of an “intermittent wink”, of images that flash in continuous “energy exchanges”. In sum, the sign, in its sweet-ferocious insistence calls attention to the design and to the presence, but at the same time triggers the trap of absence. Nothing is negated or destroyed, however nothing is in its place, there where the eye and the memory believe and desire it. It is a maneuver elaborated in the language of cartoons, of advertising, of cinema, in a world that moves itself in a sort of “gravity absence”. It is distanced from a massified culture that incorporates, in its own anonymity, every attempt to meet the roots, to confront himself with his own origins. But if the object of desire becomes unreachable or has been lost, there is nothing to do but invest the desire of an objectural valence to make it a figure, a simulacra that slides and reflects itself on the compact defense of information. Thus loss transforms itself, in its own way, into possession, it is a “over-glance” that lies also inside, it is a superficial glance that reveals the inaccessibility (the anonymity) of the “secret” that lies ahead. […]