Arnaldo Romani Brizzi
Maurizio Pellegrin: Critical Comment
 
in "Diptych. Aspects of Abstract and Figurative Art in Italy – the Eighties"
De Luca Edizioni d’Arte
catalogue of the exhibition
Milan, 1989
 

[…] The musical grace of the eighteen-century Venice is a constant element in the conceptual installation of Maurizio Pellegrin. His current creative framework, inspired by an intense interest in the current artistic debate, has led him to an art of the “new” materials in which the play of textures (rough and sober-coloured canvases, though nothing is left exclusively to the trouvé) has a predominant role in terms of artistic expression. The conceptual quality provided by a constant project in which the reference follow on one from the other (from a photograph to a number, or to a series of numbers, from a frame to a milliner’s head, etc.) sheds all overbearing anxiety and devotes itself to the awareness of a lightness in the sense of an aerial suspension of the various elements on the surface.
And in the combination of the whole, the work is an ensemble of musical notes on a vast and aleatory stave, aimed at establishing a musicality that can be interpreted independently by any system of analysis: from the horizontal to the vertical to the diagonal, from left to right, and vice versa.
The use of padding placed beneath the materials swells the substance of the works with soft, ironic pleasure; this increase the sense of lightness but produces the courteous and feasible comparison (by virtue of the always named and indefinable fil rouge of the cultural and creative references) with the movement of petticoats and fake feminine rotundity that the eighteenth century gave to the clothes of ladies, the decoration of furniture, musical spirals, and so on. Not Longhi, and not Vivaldi, certainly: yet, in a modern interpretation, Venice and its “manners” can undoubtedly be traced. A final, convincing symptom of this sis the theatricality suggested with a touch of impudence by hints of curtains and synecdoche, in the ritual or the Così è (se vi pare) that extends to the territory of pictorial values (which may not appear too much, though they are present) and the musical values behind the “mask” of structure and installation. […]