Paolo Vitolo
Maurizio Pellegrin
 
in “Maurizio Pellegrin: Disegni e Poesie”
catalogue of the exhibition
Rome, 1990
 

Every artistic action can descend from the universe of concept, inhabit a territory in which theory and imagination are inseparably joined, and at the same time engage a real situation the elements of which are and contain corresponding entities freed from their physical and perceptible nature. This, paradoxically, is the key acquisition that has allowed artistic practice to take possession in a more direct manner of reality, history, memory, and all those referents that govern existence in and beyond art.
Things, objects always possess their own “historic” and “real” vitality, their own magnetism capable of provoking the reaction of that area of the intellect which tends to go beyond the bounds of functional logic; and the inclination toward these resources has favoured the development of a whole new ethic of art making,
which in one way or another affects most of the investigations which have arisen after the emancipation from the painterly. Meanwhile the same things, or objects, appear also as forms, volumes, aggregates of different materials and technologies, generic images or elementary parts of more complex images: probably, a deeper sense of “things” in art, which makes indirect and subordinate that which is more common, constantly defibrated by the mediation of a rhetorical aesthetic.
The truth of this second meaning is the one we see in the works of Maurizio Pellegrin.
The space he has conquered takes the shape of a proposal of method, an unexpected restitution of power to the artistic discipline, plotted by means of an eloquium “in time” on the atemporal values of things. It is the opportunity for a dialectic confrontation with a world of virtual assumptions capable of deeply affecting both common sense and the physical appeal of things themselves.
Pellegrin’s “objects” thus have no autonomy of any kind, they deny themselves a little at a time. Likewise their arrangement cannot be assemblage.
Everything is “design”, pure reflection on a biographical fragment that acquires artistic status through the sedimentation of singular and diverse traces that survive time and use and are subsequently unearthed to become part of a new cataloguing, of an order relating to a new universe of meanings.
These traces are common everyday objects, invented or transformed objects, fragments of various materials, and photographic images; but their presence is completely mortified, reduced to nonsense, to silence.
Only the numbers, stamped here and there in strategic points, reveal something, or perhaps everything - - everything that the impassioned and deceptive plot of the images is incapable or unwilling to convert into signals. The numbers are therefore linguistic signs, parts of the design, and signals. They are stages in a route of information which, at precise points in the space of the work, removes the virtual film beneath which objects and images lie petrified, suggesting a geography of “ways in” to the work itself. And if the work is space, is design, then the separation of this information from the customary meanings of objects confirms the thrust toward a new cognitive synthesis of art, a sort of “reform” of the use of history that substitutes emotional or philological values (or both) with a hypothesis of reinvention of the pre-existent as a form for present time.
In this sense, and for this very reason, the inventory of visual stimuli is random,
it does not presuppose any hierarchy other than that determined by the space of the work, which acts as a synoptic screen in order that the list of the parts, that part of reality referenced by the work, should appear in its entirety. To another level of argument and of time, to another “design” will correspond another part of reality, the further specification of a judgment, at least temporarily valid, on space and on art.
At this point the arcane is unveiled.
And if it is so really, if we are really certain we possess its material, Pellegrin’s “eloquium” may appear perhaps too rich, too generous, mindful of a certain tradition of European “design” which tends to wed spatial imagination to formal satisfaction: but we are certain that even synthesis, or deduction, as far as it is able, can take on any form, use any method. It can certainly prefer to the telegraph the creative use of language.