Dominique Nahas
The Writing Room
Maurizio Pellegrin at the Esso Gallery, New York
 
in “dART International”, Vol. 3, No. 1
Toronto and New York, November, 2000
 

The elegant hermeticism of Maurizio Pellegrin’s red color coded installation,
The Writing Room, in Esso’s modest yet perfectly proportioned , rough hewn,
and sky lit project room, along with eight small drawings by the artist, seemed particularly inspired last summer. A corner surface demarcated by red mats on the floor and two walls was the receiving area for artifacts that were vaguely utilitarian and simply shape, such as weights and polished stones, as well as ritual objects including low wooden stools, ink holders, brushes, a bronze mirror, a found contemporary photograph of a public latrine, a hanging surveyor’s tripod, pots,
and bobbins of red yarn. An enormous leatherbound turn of the century accounting ledger from a long defunct pharmacy, its contents open for inspection and marked with a red sash, was placed near the corner of the floor mat closest to the viewer. Pellegrin’s installation atmospherically suggests a scholar’s room, an alchemist’s haven, a literati’s lair; it combines Asian motifs with African, Indo-European, and New World details. The Three-dimensional collage is open-ended: it does not permit the mind to localize or identify too strongly with one particular space or time.
Space in Pellegrin’s work, becomes an emplaced quadrant of blurred origins.
It insists on the impact and ceremonial presence of objects, repeated ritual shapes, and interacting textures against a field of red.
Qualities to be inferred from the color red - energy, power, and vitality – are also evident in Pellegrin’s engrossing drawings. In these works on paper, the color red, which is used with great restraint, combined with the artist’s precise linear forms and trancelike words seem to have been considered an enhanced template or psychic sensing device or tracking system for the notation of just – received sensations. These sensitive drawings recall, in some measure, the implied energy fields between the scrupulously sited objects in the artist’s adjacent installation.
Maurizio Pellegrin’s works on paper accurately convey the qualities of concentration, accumulation, displacement, and release as well as the time-bound place so vividly realized in the artist’s three dimensional work.