Vittorio Urbani
The Luxuriance of the Hybrids
 
in “Maurizio Pellegrin. Reflections and Intentions”
Venice, Arsenale Editrice, 1999
 

Perhaps Maurizio Pellegrin also works as a hybrid, accepting to step outside that which is considered the legitimate competency of an artist. In the Chinese Room,
a work created for the Nuova Icona Gallery, here we see the craftsmanship which belongs to everyday objects of the popular Chinese culture, blends ambiguously (that is to say, it hybridizes) with the artistry of other details of the installation, created by the artist which artistic aims and forms. Accumulating diverse materials but always attempting to achieve unity, an artist accepts running risks, since he behaves as one sowing different seeds in order to see which will grow best;
as a result of the choice he has made he might find either a beautiful thick lawn or otherwise an inextricable jungle of weeds.
Accepting this intermingling of levels which artists normally regard with terror, Pellegrin manages to capture the energy of their different languages and methods, and to graft them on to the body of his own work. Aside from botanical metaphor – hybridize, graft and sow – which are all terms that can be grouped under the term experimentation, and in the observation of the collection of random events that we call the ‘World’; the communal attempt to control in a biological sphere, ‘Fate’. In conclusion they are the verbs that explain typical ways of acting in which human intelligence becomes behaviour.