Riccardo Caldura
Symmetries
 
in “Maurizio Pellegrin. Reflections and Intentions”
Venice, Arsenale Editrice, 1999
 

The collections enumerate the world before the things belonging to it become less. In this way, change and instability can be retained much like one retains the hands of a departing friend into his own. In order to further extend the gesture, one can break a card in half, a symbolon among those who are parting, hoping to
re-encounter each other one day and recompose the two halves of the broken whole. The symbolon opens both the spectacular, inverse (to stay/to leave) symmetry and the dividing line, the initial fracture that renders it possible to distinguish the two halves, like the subtle and mobile line that runs between the beach and the first wave that will carry travelers far. The boat, whose sails are inflated by the Northeast wind, will separate itself from the shore, and the sailors, like painters, will be those who will prepare themselves in the distance to gather the beauties of the Earth.
But no journey and no collection would be possible if no one stayed to attend to them, and in the wait, to conserve the part broken at the moment of departure. Hölderlin believes that this act of waiting, establishing the place of return, is what poets compete for.
I don't know from which side of the ocean Maurizio Pellegrin prefers to perform his seafaring role, and instead, on which side the poet anchors, remains. It seems to me that Venice represents for him, compared to New York (the other city he has elected), a place of collection, of enumeration, of the stratification of experiences.
At the Museo Correr, in his recent exhibition, I was able to see some of his works next to those of historic collections. One felt the care of the person who gathered
the objects and re-exhibits them after gently modifying them (restored, reinterpreted). The Venetian artist's collection comes very close to the collections
of objects and paintings in his city's museum. The work of the artist continues, in a discreet and individual way, a slow work of time, of history and shelters that which he has accumulated during his journeys.
In order to resolve the arrogance of the first men, creatures with double personalities, who reproduced, copulating with the Earth like grasshoppers,
Zeus unsheathed his sword and cut off the spherical perfection of the original hermaphrodite. Thus they became incomplete beings, fragile bipeds, and with their heads forcibly turned by Zeus to observe the wound inflicted on half of their bodies, an immortal warning of divine wrath. The anger would not have stopped if humans hadn't completely understood the lesson. The sword would have be extracted one more time to divide the remaining symmetry, forcing men to resort to hopping on one leg. The able solution of inherent contradictions of the birth of human gender, proposed to other convivial beings by Aristophane, was an elegy to Eros.
Eros was an extremely potent God who would have allowed men to reciprocally search the other, as two missing halves, completing themselves and healing the wound inflicted by Zeus’ sword. The reciprocal desire would have made humans remember the reciprocal and constructive fragility of their own gender.
The force of the God of Love who attracts and puts the separated parts of the hermaphrodite together would cure this weakness.
Scattered members? Gather them? And also wrap them up? So that the wounds would seem less visible, that Eros would not only be an attraction, but a pitiful link between those divided? Pellegrin frequently wraps his objects, with patience and delicate gestures, a gesture that knows of wounds and veils them. It seems that his would be a gesture of repair, as if in other times and other places, these would have been wronged and what he worries about them, as an artist, would be the research
of a remedy. Wrap, protect, cure.
According to Vasari, Leonardo, who was bestowed with extremely excellent hands, in preparing himself to paint the head of Medusa, carried lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, locusts and bats into his studio, a room where only he could enter.
From such a disparate multitude, he was able to obtain a bizarre being, a scary and horrible “animal” that was able to poison the breath of those who carelessly came near and lit on fire the surrounding air. The creation of this figure was extremely exhausting for Leonardo, not only physically but also because there was a stench emanating from all of the dead animals in the room. It was so rancid that it couldn’t be tolerated by anyone other than him, who seemed not to smell anything for the love he felt for art. The parts of animals in Leonardo’s room become an antelitteram assemblage, and always take with them (in an efficient Vasarian expressionistic notation) the painful, unrelentless union of the heteronymous parts. A demonic work of the artist, who dismantles and remantles creatures, both cleverly and frighteningly reassembles the divided parts. I think it would be an aspect of artistic production that can't be completely anaethetized: there is something "demonic" in the combination succeeding Zeus. The operations of the Venetian artist are always clean, as if out of pity or for a sort of decency. Pellegrin has taken away vehemence and excess from the things he has then reassembled. The breath that emanates his works, remaining inside the Vasarian metaphor, doesn't have any odor, but an unnoticeable or clear breath, or the reanimation of things.
The Socratic idea that this Earth must correspond to another more ethereal, lighter Earth, where men presented themselves at the edge of air (like on this earth, at the edge of the sea), could have been translated with high scientific precision if the comparison was initially made between the land and the sea, that is, utilizing the first line of caesura among the elements on our earth. Petronio from Venice, friar and nurse in the hospitals of Padua and Venice, collected maritime products, furnished with drawings and explanations. Krzysztof Pomian underlines that the sea, for the Veronese friar, remained the element in which one could find and gather the duplicates of beings and terrestrial things: sea cows, sea calfs and sea monkeys
from evident resemblance, and then sea mice, womenfish and also the satyr and the marine devil.
One can excessively extend the catalogue if here one would add the many things that the Venetian artist has orderly arranged through the years and in many exhibitions: I remember some of them, maybe the first ones I was in Munich at the beginning of the Nineties. Working as the attendant in a "wonder room", a sort of primitive museum, each object had its own number, and as such they became parts of a homogenous series: thermometers, ropes, the ovals of canvas, building bolts, musical scores; the number was the element that coordinated the multitude of the gathered objects and that permitted them to be catalogued. A slow work for those who walk on the edge of the sea, gathering and enumerating what the ocean, incessantly and daily, expels from its vast winds and deposits on our shores.
Philolao, follower of Pythagorean’s theories, said that mathematical greatness expresses itself in the tetrad (4): the quality and color in the pentade (5), the principle of the life in the esade (6), the mind, health and what he calls "light" in the ebdomade (7), and finally, that love and friendship are expressed the ogdoade (8). But ten, more than any other number, is in conformity with nature and is the creator of things, because it has all the characteristics of a perfect number.
The perfect number can not be anything but an even number, and contain an equal number of odd and even numbers. Ten is a symmetrical number and crowd the opposites at its side, which, harmonically arranged, regulate the perfection of the cosmos. Of this mysticism of numerology, Maurizio Pellegrin’s line of research consists, not only where the numbers are characters in the work, but in the same formulating of gathering, archiving, preparing in new formal orders.
As if only in art, it would have been given the possibility of creating "the most beautiful world" from the chaos of materials (or as Heraclitus desired “from a heap of trash thrown about randomly…”).
“The road”, narrated Robert Smithson (Artforum, September 1969) about one of his Mirror Displacements, “proceeds among flocks of butterflies. In the neighborhood of Bolonchen de Reijo, thousands of butterflies with yellow, black and white wings fly next to the cars in formations of frenetic and changing flight. Many end up against the antennae of the car radio and remain hanging due to the air pressure, next to a heap of stones. Twelve mirrors were placed in the middle of large handful of butterflies that were positioned on stones. For a brief time the flying butterflies were reflected. It seemed that they were flying in a sky of gravel. The shadows thrown from the mirrors contrasted with these moments of color. A ladder in terms of time, rather than space taken place. The same mirror is not subject to time…the reflections, on the other hand, are floating instances that escape measure.
The space is what remains, or rather a cadaver, of time…The objects are excrements of thoughts and languages, ghosts of the mind, false like angels”.