Sabrina Zannier
Maurizio Pellegrin at Nuova Icona, Accademia di Belle Arti,
Oratorio of San Ludovico inVenice
 
in “Flash Art”,
Milan, February / March, No. 127, 1998
 

Only in their infinite discrepancies, both Eastern and Western culture find a meeting point in the concept of internal architectural space, understood as an extension of the human body, as organic architecture. Maurizio Pellegrin’s rooms are born from such an assumption: La Stanza Cinese, La Stanza Africana, La Stanza Italiana.
Three different rooms in three different exhibition spaces, all in Pellegrin’s Venice, gathering objects created, found, met during transfers, trips and collisions with other cultures. They are objects of memory, salvaged in their original guise and placed beside each other for similitude, arranged in a scattered (or rather ordered) way, almost as if he wanted to produce an objectural, mental and emotional inventory, where, in spite of the will to discern and clarify, the originality of the objects inevitably mixes with the copy, the genuine one with its interpretation.
La Stanza Italiana installed in the Academy of Fine Arts, in the Tablinum room of the Palladio, brings with itself the “revelation of the mark”, as Chiara Bertola writes in the catalogue: through the intimism of the drawing, probably understood in its more design-like appearance. The installation appears, in fact, meticulously ordered and almost asymmetrical.
Springing forth from all three installations is the magical dimension of the object, which emits distinct energetic charges, bearing a sort of cliché that contrasts the Western rationality of the Stanza Italiana, of which full and empty elements are normally composed, the objectual and totemic gravity of the objects in the Stanza Africana, and the spiritual levity in the Stanza Cinese. Only in this last case, the room becomes a real environment, with walls and floors of stuffed canvas dotted by small objects that in this case seem to be suspended, rising to the dimension of thought and memory, distant from intents to catalogue and order, instead aim at retrieving sensitivities and emotions.