Eleanor Heartney
Maurizio Pellegrin at Jack Shainman and John Gibson
 
in “ARTnews - reviews”
New York, October 1993
 

At a moment when so many artists seem incapable of nuance and complexity, Maurizio Pellegrin makes quiet poetry. The Italian-born artist creates assemblage works that invest ordinary objects salvaged from attics and junk shops with melancholic mystery.
Pellegrin’s work was recently visible in two locations. At Shainman he presented a series of wall works that seemed to speak to the issues of memory, nostalgia, love, and loss. Conosco le tue parole (I know what you are saying), for example, consisted of a black swathed faux-marble column placed alongside a row of black wooden pins. Their procession across the wall was broken by a vintage photograph of a group of school-children ca.1920. As with all of Pellegrin’s works one was struck first by the exquisite care given to the placement of each element and then by the dreamlike quality of the whole. Pare of the charm of Pellegrin’s works is the exclusiveness on their meaning. Is this world an elegy to a lost world. Are we to focus on the children as they appear, frozen in their innocence over the passing decades, or are we to meditate on the fact that these same children, if still alive, must be very old today?
The hermetic quality of Pellegrin’s work is enhanced by his use of numbers, which derive from some personal numerology system. Stencilled over the boxes, wooden table legs, and bundles of corrugated paper tied with black cloth, they suggest that even simple objects have hidden secrets.
At Gibson Pellegrin presented a single installation. Emptying the director’s office of its usual furniture, he covered the floor with a single layer of black books, totalling 365, each of which was stamped with a different number and tied shut with black twine or cloth. A nearly illegible scrap of poetry was scrawled on the wall. Again the notion of secrets, esoteric knowledge, and hidden meanings prevailed.
Pellegrin’s work is beautiful and subtle, two qualities that seem in little demand today. That doesn’t make them any less welcome.