Helen Kohen
Maurizio Pellegrin
 
in “The Miami Herald”
Saturday, September 25th, 1993
 

It takes fewer than a dozen works by Venetian-born artist Maurizio Pellegrin to create the atmosphere of hushed secrecy that pervades the Centre Gallery on the Wolfson Campus of Miami-Dade Community college. There is hardly any preparing for this one, a show clearly made in our time but not of it.
Pellegrin’s large and appealing wall-hung collages are structured of objects including a hatter’s blocking forms, the rusted fenders of a military vehicle, a well worn school desk and a vintage sewing machine, some of them wrapped in black cloth. Hung in near minimalist fashion against neutral linen banners, the materials yield almost no clues to their meaning. The enigma deepens when you learn that the numbers that appear in every piece are also codes whose meaning rests in the artist’s personal numerology. Still the works are handsome and teasing, suggesting something about memory, about the Italian past and the artist’s present, even suggesting ways to find oneself.