Paolo Balmas
Maurizio Pellegrin
 
in “Progetto impossibile”
Multigrafica Editrice
catalogue of the exhibition, (Palazzo Braschi, Rome)
Rome, 1985
 

For Maurizio Pellegrin, painting is a sort of cosmic diagram. A place of heart and mind where constellations and thoughts blossom, and they are immediately ours; where waves of emotion fluctuate and they are ours forever and always. Here newborn images are deposited so that the artist can effortlessly rediscover, forming clouds of color and wielding slight flashes of energy. They arrive here treading on a magnetic thread, following an invisible trace that in just one breath brings them closer and then farther, riveting them beyond our gaze and sheltering them from the snares of memory.
Goodbye Doctor Freud! / Good day Mr. Mandrake!
Who is more afraid of the unconscious? The great boiling boiler that we all secretly fraternized, damning and defending ourselves, ends up under pressure. We are reborn in the future-present, sons of a Cybernetic Super-Id that no longer distinguishes between children and adults. In order to survive, we need to learn to play, dismantling and rebuilding the memories of the world, infinitely recombining icons and symbols. Articles of faith are no longer terrible; they come to meet us as translucent and attractive, incapable of promises and deprived of history…to prove in order to believe, that sense is only form, it always has been, nothing can prevent us from being happy, it is important not to stop…don’t stop…don’t stop…Or maybe it isn’t like this? Is happiness Sisifo’s weariness and is vogue truly the sister of death? What does Maurizio think? Where do your phosphorescent bicycles lead us? Where do your day-dreaming men go, lost in the sky among disbanded letters and violin keys? To whom do the tulips that speak of love go? The graphite hearts abandoned among the stars beat for whom? And the stars? The candy-sweet pink stars that light on command in the night among the skyscrapers? For whom do they light-up their lives? We are still wayfarers and if the moon has already given us a rude and indifferent response, it isn’t for this reason that we have become capable of living without myths. The true force of a myth, its necessity and power is measured at the end, from the number of late-comers, from the crowd of converts that leave for heaven’s waiting room, that agitate their passports for the promised land. Maurizio Pellegrin isn’t one of them, he hasn’t any rush, he plays separately, giving us gifts of enamel paints and figurines of apparent uncertainty, silent explosions and every once in while, little electric shocks. He isn’t in a hurry, he plays with anticipation, he has an entire universe to himself and explores it, understands it, sections it, fills it with music, dots it with desires and pleasant expectations. He transmits on a completely different frequency. I think he may be constructing something, perhaps a new myth…surely some other enchantment.