Alfred Mac Adam
Black and White Universe
 
New York, 1993
 

Maurizio Pellegrin lives simultaneously in two kinds of time: like all of us, he bears the burden of Western history, the complex, contradictory story of how we came to be where we are today. At the same time, he experiences the past in a different way: along with history, he has inherited a shattered past, fragments excluded from history. He collects these lost elements in his work. That forgotten present has ceased to exist; all that remains are these scattered shreds of its being.
The task of the artist, as Maurizio Pellegrin sees it, is to travel through this past time gathering up the elements that mysteriously speak to his sensibility.
Pellegrin – his name recalls the Italian word for “pilgrim,” the man on the road in quest of salvation – accumulates those bits and pieces, not in order to reconstruct a lost present but to construct his own private universe. Thus, out of chaos and confusion he brings order, an elegant harmony in which fragments become an organic unity.
Pellegrin’s pilgrimage then is the artist’s quest for the occult unity ancient Greek mathematicians thought existed in numbers, it is no accidental that Pellegrin marks his work with numbers, symbols of quantity and metaphors for ideas of order.
The number two, for example, is not only the combination of one plus one but an image of unstable harmony, the balance of opposition, the tension of opposites.
In Individual Life, for instance, we see assembled a written text, a number, various lengths of hose, and a small metal box wrapped in black fabric, the number evokes the temporary harmony of art, the opposition between black and white the tension between order and chaos, and the hose the artist’s will to create a cosmos of his own devising. Not unnaturally, the text concerns permanence, change, unity and disunity, while the box is the arcane mystery implicit in the creative act.
The work of art is not a utopia but an idea made real and imposed on the world.
By their fragility, Maurizio Pellegrin’s assemblages affirm both dignity and the importance of the artist in our age.