Carla Subrizi
From the Findings of a Metaphorical Journey
 
Il Ponte Contemporanea
in “Flash Art”
February / March, 1995
 

From the beginning of the Eighties, Maurizio Pellegrin’s research has appeared oriented towards an artistic practice that radically lives inside of the stratifications
of history, thought and culture, in order to withdraw significant elements, able to develop and speak their own language, from these themes. Beyond looking for resolute convergences among chosen elements, Pellegrin constructs a rigorous combination of differing objects and materials, with the task of enacting a tension that will never quite find definite arrival points. It is this tension that the artist composes, placing one next to the other, the findings of a metaphorical journey that leads him to continual movement (without any stopping points) into cultural territories. “The elements that I gather from my trips, out in the open, as a wandering citizen, represent the seduction and the archive of knowledge, love, sensuality, of our lives”, states Maurizio Pellegrin. The artist confirms that his nature is like that of a traveler, attentive to recognizing the characteristics of a place, or an age, through the objects-signs that make them stand out. Or better, he looks for the complexity of the elements that determines a particularity in a specific object, searching for the whole in a singular thing and vice versa.
On a horizontal plane and in the present dimension, Pellegrin converges every element that he is attentive to. History is coexisting with the present; art of the past is cohabitating with current artistic research. Plato’s concept, “That which is divided in parts, and therefore, that which is everything, as well as the whole of those parts, nothing prevents the whole”, expressed in the Sophist (244), is similar to Michel Maffesoli’s definition of the object as “a condensed space”, allowing the distant lines of thought interact in the artist’s work.
Art is a matter of understanding for Pellegrin, gaining substance inside the layout of the work that begins to communicate, allowing various inlays to interact, extracted with strict and attentive selection. In fact, it isn’t about relating casual elements according to an occasional principle. The selection of objects functions by pointing to some fundamental elements that then construct an operative methodology that is enacted in each work. Firstly, it is the repetition of the same type of object that has the task of freeing the same object from its unifying nature in order to reinsert it in a circuit of similarities and transversal relations. Works like Segnare il vuoto (1991), which include forty-one leather belts, or Frammenti di una generazione in corsa (1992), in which the principal elements are different types of big gloves, are purposively meaningful. Through the repetition of a similar element, it comes off as a subtraction of the object’s physical qualities in order to empower the historical and cultural substance of which, for example, the belt or the slingshot or the glove can act as a megaphone.
Pellegrin is interested in requalifying the object, which is created through its bandaging or with the overlapping of a numerical entity. The total or partial bandaging symbolically obscures or cancels the appearance of an object in order to increase the enigmatic contents of the same object. The ribbon that bandages the objects in Prickly luggage (1994), functions as a “belt” to contain the object’s own history-energy. At the same time, it can also mean the loss of a particular identity, temporal or tied to a place, in order to find a different form of identification in the relationship that is determined between the similar elements. Also the numbers aren’t casually used. For each one of them Pellegrin has stabilized an application theory, derived from allowing different symbologies and philosophies (like the objects) to flow together, withdrawn from geographically distant or temporal cultural contexts. The object therefore isn’t deprived of meaning; it isn’t canceled or placed in the shadows. Rather it is an expansion of sense that is created in dynamism of multiple relations and interactions.
In the combination of dissimilar elements (photographs, so-called “poor” objects or where there is clear presence of the “man’s handiwork”, elements found in daily life), placed in a space open to interaction, it is the common substance, or rather a link determined through the affinities, the assonances and the analogies, to be jumped over; a substance that marks the defeat of every logistical or temporal barrier.
“No place resists”, says Massimo Cacciari in his Geo-Filosofia per l’Europa
(pg. 69), “as no time has been lived: places and times become eradicated, treated up above in the unity of the glance, which from high up, together everything dominates”. It happens in each of Pellegrin’s works – a demolition of limits, of confines; dualisms also become exceeded inside of a complex vision of the work. The process of de-ideologization, which has been presented in these last years, drives to find different orientations, new solutions for art. The subjective knowledge of the precise choices for art becomes a prerogative for the artist. This knowledge substitutes itself with the idea of a reconquered liberty, of creation and of realization. In the face of this situation, Pellegrin reaffirms the methods of his own research. Beyond new and fascinating mythologies, Pellegrin continues to work ahead of ideological alignments and homologizing tendencies. His objective is that of enacting the complex cultural stratification and the thought of reality, not for distancing himself from it but to take possession of it, expanding their substance, multiplying their sense, making it become a work that doesn’t want to systematize or structure any elements.
In Pellegrin’s works, as was seen in recent exhibitions simultaneously viewed in Rome (Galleria Il Ponte and Valentina Moncada), in Milan (Eos Arte Contemporanea), in Perugia (Piano Nobile) and in Trieste (Studio Tommaseo and Museo Rivoltella) with works realized between 1990 and 1994, there isn’t a scope to create, invent, realize objects or compositions responding to aesthetic and formal theories. The aesthetic becomes the dimension of feeling, of knowledge and perception of the real, its own time through art. For this, Pellegrin collects significant fragments of a contemporaneity in which everything flows together and stratifies itself. The thought that subtends and evolves in the realization of the work remains detached from the attainment of a definite material result. The intervention on the chosen and extracted object increases the enigmatic power of the same object, never wanting to be a substitute but simply a broadening and an expansion of its original meaning. In this sense, Pellegrin’s research assumes a fictional nature, without evading or distancing itself from the present dimension where it was born and developed.