Dario Trento
Those Venetian Pipes Combined in Los Angeles
 
Galleria Marabini
in “La Repubblica”
October 31st, 1996
 

Maurizio Pellegrin was born in Venice in 1961; he studied Art History at the University, Sculpture and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, and now practices both activities. He is professor of Art History and Art Criticism at New York University, and an artist in the United States and in Italy. The solo exhibition installed at the Galleria Marabini faithfully records his artistic path.
Venice, a city of fragile territorial location, has been, for the entire length of history,
a space endowed with exchanges, first with the Orient and then with the European bourgeoisie, now among the worldly flow of tourism and works of art. From their histories, the Venetians have inherited the vocation for travel and the availability for “the other”, and Pellegrin has composed the material of his recent works of this aspect.
The work Laguna in the exhibition explains it, combining terracotta pipes salvaged from the depths of the Venetian lagoon with a photograph of Los Angeles.
In fact, he relates the human sea recalled from the Venetian pipes with a place without a center and everything "communication" that is the Californian metropolis. Other works salvage historic Venetian craftmade materials as supports from which he projects cognitive trajectories on the future using rituals and Zen-like instruments, which the artist has encountered in America.
In completely unexpected forms, one can say accordingly that the artist’s works restabilize the relationship between Venice and the Orient, even though sometimes the evocative force of the antique objects surpass the work, or render the cognitive structures used by the artist mechanical.