Rolando Barahona-Sotela
Unfolding Energies, Maurizio Pellegrin at the MADC, Costa Rica
 
in “Trilogías, Maurizio Pellegrin”
Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo
catalogue of the exhibition,
San Josè, Costa Rica, 2002
 

Navigating in the values that structure his own culture and other cultures of diverse extraction is for Pellegrin a constant stimulus, in the meticulous search for those objects that express what is permanent and characterize them.
This untiring explorer with a poet’s soul does not look for a meaning, he watches in stealth, he intuits and gives a new interpretation to the vibrations that he perceives in his rut market by an extensive artistic trajectory. From this drifting, the artist extracts materials loaded with symbols and past shadows. “ I use objects with an aura”, says Pellegrin.
And Trilogies, like the convergence of three dissimilar cultures, it’s no exception, like a space fed through the veins of history of people deeply rooted in the depths of time. An intervene space in Sala II in MADC, that like a deployment of energies culminate in the superior level, in Sala IV, with two trios projected in video produced in collaboration with two other artists; the first group produced by Matt Marello,
the second produced by Swati Khurana, both count with the performance of Maurizio Pellegrin.
The moving images translate and amplify the cognitive and perceptive experience, innate in the being, like an interpretation of violence and peace that in a contradictory ensemble surrounds humanity with a veil. Histories imbibed in the mind reflected in the artist’s rostrum that plays and delights with the wobbling of some intertwined bulb lights, and the same with the candles, threads, and fibbers elaborated by sensible hands loaded with sadness and happiness. Messages that fall off between textures and forms that keep mysterious secrets, like a black velvet handbag with the womb full of woman’s secrets, some indiscreet binoculars, an austere kimono of geometric ceremonial line, or a procession of wooden handles in military formation. Memories that look out and speak of how organization, numbers, and human energy invested in the creative processes play a roll of vital importance in the wefts suspended between the here and the cosmos that leads the imagination of Pellegrin’s poetic atmosphere.
With a sensitivity just beneath the skin and that sharpens in front of the spiritual content of beings and objects that he discovers in his road, this dreamer poet with intense soul moves like a vigilant hawk detecting even the subtle movements not perceived in a first encounter. Contents that the objects, like the human beings, acquire and intensify with time. Objects that unveil deprive and singular spirits of a period, the Zeitgeist, or spirits of time, like Hegel, the philosopher calls them.
Thus, Pellegrin, the artist, the poet, the Venetian, cannot elude the surge of the blood of his ancestors, navigators and merchants from Venice, that already in the
XI century extended a bridge through seas with eastern millenarian cultures. Vindicating precious objects like the silk and the velvet, that since the times of Marco Polo where imported to the Serenissima (Venice), queen of the effervescent lagoon with marine and adventurous spirit.
The expressions of this thorough goldsmith of threaded sensations do not obey to established patterns, on the contrary, they propose a fresh vision that inserts the legacy of the beings that integrated a community that go on conforming the cultural patterns, like a response to the confrontations and challenges of the daily living. Subtly, the spectator is invited to share an intangible table of energetic exchange between dissimilar languages that engage in a silent dialogue.
Invited visitor to be part of a space created by this skilful explorer of essences and myths, with the option of living the experience also as a navigator whose imagination wings are loosen to complete, without his intension, a story with multiple interpretations. Vibrations tie together by the artist’s instinct that take over the emptiness contained in diverse spaces such as: a Palazzo, a museum, an oratory, a Villa, a church and even a botanical garden in India. Three dimensions that this explorer animates and that can be interpreted like a metaphor of flowing in the riverbed that takes with him the vibrations and the taste of those beings that have rinse their body and fed their spirits in its bold waters. Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff, when he talks about trans culture in hi book Visual Culture, with great skill quotes poet Langston Hughes: “I have encounter rivers as ancient as the world, and with more age than the flow of human blood in humans vein”. This poem evokes the passing of time in Pellegrin’s discourse.
In Pellegrin’s work, color is transforms into an object of intense vibration in the conformed space, and even more, in a language that talks about an affair between mind and matter. Color is no more a background, it gives birth to an atmosphere that surrounds the spectator and integrates him in multidimensional dynamics, evoking the energetic presence that maintains this changing message to the individual eyes. He appeals to the recognizable or identifiable of a symbol like a cloth, a book, a cigarette holder, a ball of yarn, but all of them impregnated with mysticism and traditions coming from a culture with millenary roots like the oriental or those developed in the Dark Continent that trap the spectator with their mysterious vibration, for those who have not inhabited and lived from within. Among the multiple installations created: The Chinese Room, The Italian Room, The African Room, The Japanese Room, or Trilogies, they are part of spatial design that the artist suspends within another existing space, a patio, a gallery, or a convent.
The object is the protagonist and the key of the invisible textile that stitches the philosophical contents, whereupon Pellegrin impregnates the elements that he makes his, as part of his biography, to transform and share them with others that penetrate his spatial interpretations that float in a refined air, slipping away in caresses of peace and equilibrium in time. Air is charged with intense experiences that bounce in the soul, heart, and spirit and that counteract the social negative disturbances. Expressions that talk about a balance between his ancestors and the ancestors of each and every individual that walks into the ambits, but with a recently polished memory that situates us and confirms the validity of the existence in a present of an original and metaphoric language. A bounce between past and present that live within each one of our cells containing energies that go back to the first signs of life in the planet.
Trilogies is a friendly dialogue between dissimilar spirits, in a mood that evokes the introspection within a meditative ambit that incites to live a unique personal experience. It is a placid green space that inspires renewal and faith in an unknown happening. Shadows that come along with the objects, that impregnate them with depth like repetitive silhouettes that talk about energy, of an aura in the creaks that come from previous life steps. Past absences and shadows, generations not forgotten, new presences that adorn the object with contemporary vitality.
The ceremonious rhythm with which the elements have found their way over the involving bright and vital green, which confers to the collection a revitalizing vibration in an embrace with forms, functions, and the human tasks impregnated with an indelible aroma in braids and embroideries. An aroma imprisoned in the fibbers of the materials that generated the tailoring and transformed by the artist in a symbol that triggers mental images in the spectator.
Three purifies mental lucubration, inspired by the particularities of three cultures:
the Chinese, the Italian and the Japanese, shaking hands with respect in a solemn ceremony of indissoluble brotherhood, sharing peace, austerity and tolerance.
It is an eager utopia, anxious to become a real fact.