Michele Zaggia
Maurizio Pellegrin
 
in “Maurizio Pellegrin. Reflections and Intentions”
Venice, Arsenale Editrice, 1999
 

Vague and mobile weaving among conscience, memory and thought, are such that the sight of Maurizio Pellegrin’s works calls to mind, from the very first moment,
the words with which Heidegger interprets Iki: “A breath of quietness which enrapts luminously” ¹ Words which, perhaps not by chance, seem to echo in many of the titles this Venetian artist has given to his works. The sort outline of this contribution will be inspired by Heidegger’s words and therefore, rather than aesthetic judgments (in my opinion aesthetics is no more than sensitive sight, as a defective complement of theoretical ultrasensitive sight)” I will testify, from the point of view of practical thought, the emotional encounter with works of practical art. Before starting it is in any case opportune that I clarify why the terms “thought” and “art” are preceded by the word “practical”. Using this term, in fact, I intend to affirm, in disagreement with the common way of understanding the relationship of philosophy and art, that also philosophy, far from being knowledge absolute in itself or ultrasensitive sight separated from sensitive sight, is itself also a practice and that is “a meaning assembling of elements drawn from preceding practices, with new meaning functions and new effects of truth”². Naturally my position has to do neither with empiricism, as perhaps the term “practical” might suggest, nor with any version of nihilistic hermeneutics. For me, in fact, just as the human pretence to achieve absolute truth is madness, the conviction that there is no truth, that everything – as we say – is relative, is just as mad. Madness inasmuch as one is not aware that “relative” has a defective meaning only if it is considered implicitly linked to “absolute”; madness because for the relativist the absolute has only changed its sign: from knowledge of All to knowledge of Nothing. And instead there is truth, but truth whose insuperable event is articulated in the infinite human practices under changeable meanings. Truth is then this; truth in the mode of philosophy, in the mode of science, in the mode of art and... in the modes of their reciprocal and unexpected intertwining. Art, therefore, can non longer be understand as a “beautiful lie”.
After this clarification, let us go back to the emotional meeting with the works of Maurizio Pellegrin. Now, this is a question of experience of “suspension”, of phenomenological epoché , during which I have grasped in the works of this artist that which I would call rhythmical empty-full breathing. If it is certainly true that every work of art can be interpreted as a relation between empty and full, I believe however that not every work of art can be experienced as rhythmical empty full breathing. In the works of the Venetian artist, the void is not produced as a simple coexistence, an aesthetic contiguity with respect to the fullness or, in other words, void is not added to fullness as thought the one and the other were two entities, each subsisting in itself, and that only subsequently come into relationship.
The rhythmical empty-full breathing of the work of art (but also, evidently, of any experience that is “perfect” of its kind) happens only when the Event (the Taoist “Xu” and also the Spinozian Substance) occurs in each work determined not as the full sum of void and full, but intensively either as a void or us fullness. The Event has such is void and full, but at the same time it is neither void nor full. And it is in this way that the Event occurs in the work has rhythmical breathing, as void-blending-into-full and full-blending-into-void. In conclusion, I would like to add as well that my witness would not be complete if I left out that which is not so much part of phenomenological evidence, but rather part of personal feeling. My first encounter with the works of Maurizio Pellegrin in a small and snug art gallery on a Venetian island. Walking through streets, crossing bridges and squares, sailing across canal and the Lagoon, of itself encourages the experience of rhythmical void-full breathing, and that happens because Venice is also a work of art which, with its empty spaces and full spaces, leads us to abandon the arrhythmical pace of everyday life. Well, it was during that encounter that I became aware that Venice was not a mere and occasional container of the works of Pellegrin, but on the contrary, that there was between the city and the artist a deep consonance: between the city and those works a kind of transubstantiation was in act, pulsating colour changes to the same rhythm of respiration.

Notes

1 Martin Heidegger, In cammino verso il linguaggio, Mursia, Milano 1973
2 Carlo Sini, Gli abiti, le pratiche, i saperi, Jaka Book, Milano 1996