Agnes Kohlmeyer
Maurizio Pellegrin

 in “The Water Dream”
Cleveland Center for the Contemporary Art
catalogue of the exhibition
Cleveland, Ohio, 2000
  

“…Water is time, and water offers beauty its duplicate. We ourselves, who are partly made of water, serve beauty in the same way. Through its touch with water this city improves the patina of time, embellishing the future. This is the function of this city, within the universe. Because a city is static, while we are kinetic. Tears prove this. Because we are transient and beauty remains. Because we aim towards the future, while beauty is eternal presence. …”

Iosif Brodskij, Fondamenta degli Incurabili, 1989

The Water Dream - what part has this dream for the Venetian artist Maurizio Pellegrin, what role does it play for all of us? First of all there is Venice,
the water-borne city which forged its inhabitants while it remained the city of dreams for the whole world. A dream for all travellers, foreigners who come to Venice to let their dreams come true for a while, or to track down what they longed to find while far away, but what does not always necessarily correspond to reality.
That Venice, which attracted painters in all times who wanted to capture its real light that was always linked to water, Venice visited by Goethe and Hofmannsthal, Byron and Pound, Thomas Mann, Iosif Brodskij and many other writers and poets, some came back again and again and for longer, more lasting stays, and Venice was the inspiration of wonderful impressions and stories. But I would never miss the fantastic vision of mystery and magic offered by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his unfinished story Andreas oder die Vereinigten written between 1911 and 1913:
“…He is moving in a time which is not completely present and in a place which is not completely here. For him, Venice is a fusion of classical antiquity and the East, from where it is impossible to sink back into meanness and idleness.” Or “…The square was deserted, as before, the empty boat was floating motionless under the bridge, and Andreas thought this was a sign which encouraged. He went on as if in a dream…”
A dream city also because no one would like to be awakened from this dream, to be put right with respect to what he had imagined before. In the minds of many, the idea of Venice moves in a rather degenerate direction. Many like to imagine a dark, mysterious Venice of decay, doomed to sink, ever sliding downwards.
The Venice of floods, plagues, Venice of the old glories of the past and its past power, now tending little by little towards its final fall. This is the City of the famous story Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, known through many pictures, whose image yet prevails in common literature, a Venice totally different from any foreigner‘s everyday life at home. Even for a Venetian, who has well to spend his everyday life here, Venice is a place to whose peculiarity, beauty, silence and light he will never grow totally accustomed: a dream lasting forever…
In Maurizio Pellegrin's installation for the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, red is the prevailing color, red - the color of energy, fire, passion, love, life…; red like blood, bloodred, fiery red, purple red, bright red, vivid red, coral red… .
More than three yards wide, a huge piece of bright red padded fabric hangs down the wall, like a red sea, in the middle of which a gondola is "moving" or, better still,
it is an old black-and-white photograph of a Venetian gondola with a felze, i.e. the gondola top used in the past, and its gondoliere doing his job, steering his boat dutifully and discreetly through the lagoon. The red fabric carries other objects as well. A forcola, for example, the famous wooden oarlock of Venetian gondolas that nowadays only few craftsmen are able to carve. Furthermore, there is a little slate on which the very motion of writing is important; and red wool yarn balls - like red thread crossing the whole, and a series of wooden objects stemming from the printing trades and textile crafts and that speak of "doing", work, energy and, hence, of motion.
On the floor, on the red "fabric sea" there is again one of those silent felze, that old gondola top, here life-size, which once had been black. It is an artistic work provided with openings and curtains. I cannot but ask myself the same question, when I consider Maurizio Pellegrin's whole work, in which single "collected" and assembled objects are shown tied or wrapped, thus concealed and protected. Isn‘t the gondola "felze" here a sort of "bandage", something that prevents seeing and being seen? Today's tourists, of course, do not need cabins with curtains because they want to look at the beauty of the city as freely as possible. But gondolas of the past were made for the Venetians who moved from one place to another and did not necessarily need to see anything. And sometimes, as one may suppose, some passengers perhaps wanted not to be observed. Even the traveller Goethe seems to have used this means of transportation, "protected from the gaze" several times,
as one can read in his "Venetian Epigrams":
"This gondola I can compare with a gently rocking cradle,
and the cabin on its top appears like a roomy coffin. That's right!
Between the cradle and the grave we are swaying and floating on the great channel carelessly on our way through life."
Therefore a felze is a safe place, a shelter in the middle of overall motion,
a mysterious container inside which something may happen and where both loneliness and sociability are possibilities. As it always happens, even here there is a dichotomy. The installation in Cleveland also includes the coral symbol.
Coral, a living sea animal: in the course of centuries, its closely standing skeletons build up complicated plant-like structures that later become valuable material.
Since ancient times it has been used to make ornaments and jewels.
Red coral is also used as a good-luck charm, its color is considered a color gauge for the health of the person who bears the piece of jewellery.
The natural elements - air, fire, water and earth - show a connection with all we see here and can associate with.
From earth, sand, together with fire we get glass.
The art of glass blowing, a very complicated craft, has always been closely tied to Venice. Here we find a coral shape made with an ornately moulded bright red glass paste with a small precious silver locking capsule at its bottom, on which the number 21 is applied. The twenty-first is the artist's birthday and in many regards is a particularly lucky number for him. Twenty-one was once the age of majority; to come to maturity, three times 7 is needed, and 7 is the perfect number of magic capabilities, a synthesis of mind and body. This installation comprises 21 different elements. Quantifications with arithmetic meanings and qualifications of the symbolic meanings of numbers, play an important role in all of Pellegrin's works.
Corals and pearls from the sea, gold and silver, damask, velvet and silk, precious objects imported from remote countries by tradesmen, travellers, since Marco Polo's time. Venice, the "Serenissima", the "queen among all cities", the important city of navigators, trans-shipment center for goods from the East.
Materials studded with symbols and commonplaces. "I use objects which have an aura", the artist says.
Pellegrin, the Venetian, who for many years has been living in New York as his second home, always considers himself a traveller who collects every kind of material and object. These objects evidently come from his town: a gondola cabin, a glass coral, an old photograph, the objects on the big fabric wall. All of these objects have their own lives. Everyone may recognize something peculiar in them - they possess a totally autonomous memory treasure.
"In my works each object has at the same time a material and a spiritual meaning. These objects express energy, positive as well as negative feelings, but always a human memory," Pellegrin declared in 1994 in an interview with Jonathan Turner.
Once again Pellegrin offers us a symbolic passage between the energy an object possesses intrinsically and the effort by which each object fights for the conservation of the same.