Barbara Tosi
The Vocation of Painting
 
in “Projected artists - Obiettivo: Roma III/V”
Studio Stefania Miscetti, Rome
2RC Edizioni d'Arte,
catalogue of the exhibition
Rome, 1996
 

Over and beyond the underlying individual inspiration or form, representation through images is the common denominator of the act of painting. The images may represent landscapes, people, animals and objects as well as emotion, feelings, thoughts, and complex amalgamations of each of these.
The painter highlights, underlines, exalts what he fills with content and loads with meaning.
If therefore we assume that the vocation of painting is evidence of things,
in Maurizio Pellegrin’s work that evidence has become the extreme word.
In each of his paintings the stroke of the brush arranges objects, shapes and colours, taken from the pallet of life, from the complicated mosaic of being.
Each painting illustrates, evokes and, at the same time, recomposes a state, an existential condition of things.
The concrete reality of the objects conveys sound and taste, time and mood, beginning and end, but without having to narrate daily events. The objects are shrouded by an invisible, opaque, transparent veil, that softens cold, clinical truth.
They are mellowed by this film, rendered familiar through use, at the same time receiving life from the very fact of having been abandoned in representation.
They evoke the essence of being without words. In a sense they are fetish and simulacrum.
In analysing painting, to give priority only to objects and their arrangement, risks becoming a purely literary undertaking, for the concrete and the fantastic elements constituting image both represent the mystery of the ineffability of art, whatever the theme or technique.
Were it otherwise we would have to face the absurd question as to whether the work itself exists through the means, the structure, the end result or the eyes of the spectator.
The work exists precisely for itself, for how it develops and allows communication between soul and soul. Its physical measure is infinitely more illusory than its imaginary measure.
Art performs its function in the context of knowledge. In art, knowledge is enriched through method and form.
In his Bauhaus lessons Klee said “Art does not render us the visible, it renders visible”.
In his assembly of objects, shapes and images, Maurizio Pellegrin restores visibility to a lost, disaggregated reality.
The various elements of each work exist within a given space, sustained by the global image.
As in the scansion of music, they are ordered and made to express a whole, according to a notion of time.
Space and time merge, creating a rhythm of shapes, a particular kind of calculated and regular syllabification, without ever separating the number from the overall design of the numbers themselves.
So strong is the vocation of painting that it does not suffer from lack of brushes, canvases, easels, or whatever. It permeates style, adapts itself to the chosen tools, whatever they may be; it arranges and organises itself, takes up residence and shelters, enveloping the works of itself.