Franco Basile
Memories on the Wall. Pellegrin's work at "Marabini"
 
in “Tutto Bologna - Il Resto del Carlino”
Bologna, October 6th, 1996
 

The affinities between clippings of the past and moments of the future can be hung from threads of memory, or from the walls of a gallery. Maurizio Pellegrin, Venetian artist, lives in New York for most of the year, where his memories seem to become charged with distant visions. It must be like circumscribing the present with notes conceptually gathered throughout the years and transformed into signs of poetry. “Poor” poetry but at the same time rich with humors, with suspended affinities as the artist defines them, with something that indicates analogies of emotion.
Pellegrin’s artistic path is marked by a number of international exhibitions; he is now forty years old, but in 1998 took part in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennial.
He operates outside of the so-called traditional models, even though making installations isn’t so unusual, as well as knowledge of the "poor" and "conceptual" never appears to be well-established in his works. But there is something almost lyrical in his research, especially in evoking the measure of time and in balancing, with old papers, numbers and black cloth, days lived in distant eras, situations, that are traced with old, elegant markings, or suggested by findings fished in the waters of the lagoon. Pellegrin’s affinities are now hung from the walls of Galleria Marabini (via Nosadella 45). Compositions clear and black, assemblages intellectually arranged like the geometry determined by the alignment of terra-cotta pipe bowls.
A thing of the Eighteenth century, objects that smokers threw in the water once
they were completely used.
Everything in this Bolognese exhibition evokes memories of Venice. The color black dominates, alternating with photography, in grayed papers like grays appearing in the transparency of some garments; a motif that recalls themes that have already been dealt with but now seems to vanish in evoking those realities that are particularly dear to the artist. In each room an installation; on each wall a page to transcribe memories. There is also a cluster of soccer cleats, the type once adorned with leather heels. These are also black, shiny affinities of an age that may also be lustrous, perhaps unrepeatable and maybe for this reason they are hung like reunited voices in the rooms whitened by emotion.