Renato Barilli
Gatherer of Objects…A Sector that Attracts…
Cheers, Rome has a New Garden
Marking the Void
 
in “L'Espresso”
October 28th, 1994
 

Today’s youth primarily focuses their research on the topics of objects and concepts; among the devotees of the former, we find Venetian Maurizio Pellegrin. Not yet forty years old, his work has already appeared in the "Aperto" section of the 1988 Venice Biennial.
To say "object" means nothing if you don't clarify the many ways according to which you can insert them in the work. Pellegrin, for example, is among those who propose serial, multiple, combinatorial usages. He is a gatherer, a collector moved by that inscrutable taste which drives those devotees to a certain genre, finding examples everywhere and exhibiting them with pride.
His works are always articulated in multitudinous components, which are then hung from the walls like describing trophies, panoplies, according to an organization in which order and disorder are turned upside-down within each other.
The titles that Pellegrin gives to his assemblages are perfectly eloquent: Segnare il vuoto, in fact, the origin can be first found in an “horror vacui” to measure our times. One step more in that it is the recognition of the greed that drives authors to add “one more” element, much like a collector’s habits. And of course, everything is at the service of “our gaze” which becomes the protagonist of these works as it is the protagonist of the acts that allows the author to individuate objects that merit the choice.
There isn’t an externally imposed coloring, rather the various families of objects are already chosen at the onset of the work, in such a way that they confirm the prevalence of a key chrome, which then on the other hand responds to a negation of color. In fact, blacks and browns dominate furniture pieces, the white of undergarments or yellowed paper aged through time; sometimes ostentatious hints of gilding appear, with which Pellegrin is revealed to be the heir of a imperious assemblagist like Louise Nevelson.