Vittorio Sgarbi
The Imprints of Maurizio Pellegrin
in “Maurizio Pellegrin”
catalogue of the exhibition, (Galleria Capricorno, Venice)
Venice, December 7th, 1985
 

Maurizio Pellegrin loves literature. His exhibition catalogues, with their elegant and original graphic covers, are deprived of presentation, and hide themselves, as a guarantee, behind citations of a general argument on the contemporary aesthetic of Giulio Carlo Argan and Achille Bonito Oliva, skipping over Renato Barilli in order to directly arrive at Marshall McLuhan, the pages are crossed by unforeseen citations that have the power to multiply themselves to infinity. We read Raymond Chandler and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. But against the light I have already read Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas. These readings are heard in stanzas like, “I traveled Europe and America, I drank a raspberry shake, I saw the train station cut through the fields of roses, I felt joy and disgust; I don’t make art, I only make my face lean and glean, and I am expecting it at every angle of the city”. This isn’t one of Maurizio Pellegrin’s favorite authors, in fact these are the words said by Pellegrin himself in the introduction of the 1982 exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro. In anticipating the developments of his then-current research, he then wrote “I will speak only of black and white, as white, without employing too many color theories, is white, and black is black, and black is placed on white or vice-versa, and if something is born, as long as it is not overly vague, then it is your individual effect, your own language”. To Pellegrin’s bewilderment, the latest canvases are therefore connected, substantially large, dimensional, monochromatic paintings in acrylic and enamel, rough surfaces on which luminous explosions stand out (this is the function of contrast between the acrylic and enamel). Precious material, dense, which negates the support in order to reproduce the lunar nature, both real and imaginary, on which man has past and has left soft traces, imprints. Without danger, without threats, we observe these distant and mysterious lands with a telescope and on the surface, we see slightly uneven signs, graphic imprints, pencil passages that announce constructions, allude to spaces, to space. The explosions recompose themselves through these scratches that have their honored prehistory in Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, Gastone Novelli. I immediately thought of it, it was a way for me to make up for an understanding unconditioned by new criticism, more dominant than militant, of a young artist by gentile ways, by a sweet voice, tenderly cultured but like everyone else, in danger of losing itself. The marks on the canvas are like the first words of a new language, a pretext and a clutch: they will save and defend it.
I wasn’t aware of him when some of his works appeared in the exhibition Progetto Impossibile at Palazzo Braschi in Rome, in June of this year. It seemed to be, as I had written, a lost occasion, for a more than impossible, improbable project. And yet Pellegrin was present with an incredibly large painting, Untitled, where precious marks, like primitive testimonials, or ideograms of a still undecoded writing, crossed the vast field dotted like a night sky. At the center, a more ample mark delimits the confines of a trembling form, like the image of a heart in a child’s drawing. There is something passionate and romantic in the artist’s large canvas, who really believes in the active force of art on the time of history to extract Flaubert’s phrase in McLuhan: “The war of 1870 would not have been fought if the people would have read my Sentimental Education”. In another book by Djuna Barnes, whose title Nightwood can be given to one of the Maurizio Pellegrin’s next paintings, we read an analogous phrase that can be valid for all artists that believe in the value of the works and the liberating force of the images: “an image is something that the mind creates to stop uncertainties […]. As much as we learn of a person, the less we know about them. Once I knew there was a cathedral in Chartres, I don’t need to know anything else, at least I’ve been to Chartres and thus I can see the perspective in the heights relative to the cathedral and the lives of the population. Otherwise to learn that a certain Jean from that city threw his wife in a puddle can’t do anything but confuse ideas. Once I imagine it, this fact takes the same proportions as the cathedral. Just like children, in the way they understand enough of life, they draw people just as tall as homes”. Maurizio Pellegrin’s heart is the heart of the world, it doesn’t have real dimensions, it doesn’t have proportions, it doesn’t listen to reason, it corresponds to the verses of another one of his favorite authors, Friedrich Hölderlin:

This love of sky, delicate –
If I forget about you, rich islands
Of destiny and fire, from great time
become ashes and desolation,
Loved, eyes of a prodigious world –
I only truly like you
Shores where you expiate idolatry
Or love, love only of immortals.