Nicolas Tobier
Maurizio Pellegrin
 
in “Spray International, Juliet ”
No. 64, October / November, 1993
 

Pellegrin’s dispersed field wall assemblages offer a view that is autobiographical and suggestive of time past without being overtly sentimental. Through his collections of papers, clothes, photographs and other ephemera, Pellegrin creates arrangements that are poetic rebuses. By surveying their component parts the viewer is invited to piece together the clues that uncover the equations total. Readings can be unfolded through individual associations offered by individual elements and their relative groupings. One of the works in the exhibition, Story of Love, is a large wall hung with bound, ruffled paper bundies and black photo albums, also bound to either hide their secrets or protect them from escaping. These works are carefully arranged as would be a collection of well-loved mementos. Pellegrin appreciates the romance of the past and the suggestive history embodied in old objects, coated with a patina of age. By including what is old, the artist benefits somewhat from validity afforded something old by virtue of its simply having existed for a while, as if it had grown wise with age. Directed by a system in which elements of the work are defined by a numerical system with mathematical analogies.
Like a rebus of these objects-equations expands. Numbers suggest magical qualities as in the teachings of the Kabala or other mystical numerology. They also suggest rational system of ordering as in Pythagorean formulas. Inventories or indexing.
By superimposing the possibility of logic over personal poetics and emotion, Pellegrin’s systems is not unrelated to the utopian idealism of Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian who sought to impose order in nature. In his acknowledgement of the persistence of sentiment with the effort to deduce meaning, Maurizio Pellegrin’s work relates most to the collecting/archaeological fascination of Sigmud Freud. Freud saw analysis and archaeology as similar in process, each exposing layers of experience. The objects in Freud’s collection and in Pellegrin’s work exemplify this theory, respected for their past and revered for their timelessness.