Paola Ugolini
Maurizio Pellegrin
 
Valentina Moncada - Rome
Il Ponte contemporanea - Rome
Piano Nobile - Perugina
Studio Tommaseo - Trieste
Museo Rivoltella - Trieste
Eos - Milan
in “Flash Art”
November, 1994
 

Objects repeated in series and wrapped in black bandages in order to protect them from the glances of an indiscrete public, or maybe covered in order to maintain the aura, the energy, which continues to palpitate live and intact under the thick cloth that Maurizio Pellegrin, the Venetian artist who currently resides in New York, has wound around numerous fragments scattered throughout in Rome.
The series of works gathered at the Valentina Moncada gallery entitled
Your Glance represents the cognitive moment par excellence: it appears, brilliantly expressed in the work that also bears the title of the exhibition, composed of sixteen pages of Eighteenth century Venetian manuscripts that ideally frame a fragment of black and white posters, where the naïve and at the same time, alluring feminine eye seems to fix the spectator, enchanting him.
All of Pellegrin’s works lean towards the research of new forms of visual communication: objects, numbers, photographs alternate in rhythmic scans of empty and full, marked by signs and symbols that once aligned on the walls, establish and harmonize themselves like a musical score, giving life to a more pictorical than material installation and where, notwithstanding the serial repetition of the forms, “…each object acquires its own meaning without impoverishing itself with nuances” (Jonathan Turner). It is with the idea of creating a unitary message in spite of the composition’s fragmented appearance that Pellegrin assembles his series of strictly similar objects on the walls, and which often have to do with the human body and its materiality: leather belts, baseball gloves, umbrella handles, forms for shoes, books and aggressive symbols like knives, slingshots and ropes: “…I am primarily interested in those objects that reveal the physical presence of man rather than the human body itself…”. And still rubber stamps, balls, rope coils are combined with other completely different objects such as Baroque architectural elements, columns, fragments of gilded wood. The fulcrum of the work is inevitably constituted by black and white photographs which are often representative of figures performing activities destined to remain mysterious for the observer because these figures are cut in such a way to eliminate the information necessary for us to understand them.