Ludovico Pratesi
Notes on Maurizio Pellegrin's Works
 
in “Maurizio Pellegrin”
Valentina Moncada
catalogue of the exhibition
Rome, 1992
 

“In the literature of this hemisphere there are plenty of ideal objects called forth and dissolved in an instant according to poetical needs.”
Jorge Louis Borges, Ficciones, Buenos Aires, 1955

I remember, when I first saw one of Maurizio Pellegrin’s works, the sense of rational and mysterious order it showed. Those objects scattered on the wall seemed to be unstrung pearls held together by the invisible thread of reason.
A ratio intrinsic in the work, becoming a sublime necessity, interweaving resistant webs within the spaces between one object and the other and regenerating itself, with the same lucidity, in the viewer’s mind.
Before those old gondolier’s oars, put next to soft padded cushions, I thought of the tables in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, of the huge effort made by the philosophers of Enlightenment committed to the overwhelming enterprise of cataloguing the whole world.
By assuming, as Giorgio De Santillana says in his Reflections on man and ideas (1) , that “art-masters wanted to include in the construction all the proportions, distances and planetary harmonies, cycles and recurrences, units of measure and music, squarings, polygons and ratios ...”, we could reach the core of Maurizio Pellegrin’s production, since his postulate refers to the fragmentary nature of work bearing within itself multiple coexistent aspects, that is: variety of elements, materials, measure units etc. That means proportions touching the geometry of every thing.
And according to Santillana, defining the rôle of thought “...not as the quest of a break-through point ... but as the quest of harmony, of proportion, of rhythm in which one includes oneself ...”, in Pellegrin’s work we could also discover the presence of number, its necessity, its use, its keys of interpretation.
These works are composed of different elements related to one another on an exchange basis: some of them are initialled by figures expressing their intrinsic quantity of energy. The latter, by connecting itself to the other elements that exist within the work, strengthens the overall potential. That is what Maurizio Pellegrin defines as “energy quantification”.
The other meaning of numbers, to be defined as “symbolic qualification”, begins by choosing figures for what they represent on the symbolical level in order to orientate communication.
After all, from ancient times Soul is entrusted to the number, and these assemblies of objects seemingly casual but interwoven with a mysterious ambiguity, suspended between the empyrean of ideas and the heaviness of matter, sometimes leave the beaten track in order to follow imperceptible traces, often capable of changing the entirety of human existence.

Motor-racing track
The racing track remains laid out and pulsing like a rug that seems to absorb the voices and colors of a summer already gone up in flames. On the asphalt the witness of a surface relation, the prospect of an existence from below.
Every little rug is silence, a witness of what remains or goes away.
 

About Senses and Rain
A late afternoon in July.
A darkening sky. A tornado entering the lagoon. Incredible force of nature, incredible force of waters, incredible Venice.
What about the deep sensuality, the rain on the faces of people, the effort of binding oneself to the spirit of things.
What about our energy and the will to exist.
 

Overtakings
Running news, flowing melted glass, a car cutting the Arizona desert.
Every thing runs after other things.
Time does not exist, overtakings are thrusts of the energy of perpetual motion, even rubber-stamps are a part of this memory of the transient. And the shadows created by them contribute to maintaining intact the work’s inscrutability.
 

Forces of Passion
Strings are whistling in the air, and trees bent by the effort seem to launch signals that almost reach the valley bottom. It is not easy to keep intact the moving force of silence.
As for the ancient works of Passion painters, where life and death, fall and rise are the contraries in which we should identify ourselves in order to come back again into our self.
 

Dark Force of Light
ight subtends a mystery. Inner tubes in their materialness celebrate the sense of unsolved tension. Slings shoot bodies that cut the air as the light seems to do that comes from the big floodlights that men point at the moon. The infinity of world’s planes almost disheartens und haunts us in its scansion.
 

Poetical Consequences of an attitude
Objects lie down on the wooden support like musical exercises.
The orchestra has the severity of solitude.
The small blackboards do not bear signs except the comfort of what was noted once.
The attitude of putting oneself in front of the world unfailingly generates consequences.
Poetical consequences are the virtuous nature of the septenary man.
 

About Sentimental Vibrations
Eight symbolizes the eternal spiral movement of cycles.
Eight is the infinite, the recurrent infinite of images.
From the center a continuous vibration, keeper of mysterious pulses, imperceptibly shakes the work.
Sentimental vibrations are the subtle game of chance of man in the universe.

Notes

(1) Giorgio De Santillana, Reflections on man and ideas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968)