Ernesto Carlo Alvarez
Multicultural Itineraries: Interior Journeys
 
in “Trilogías, Maurizio Pellegrin”
Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo
catalogue of the exhibition,
San Josè, Costa Rica, 2002
 

In some ways, by returning to and sometimes remembering the fabulous voyages of his medieval compatriot Marco Polo, where mythical references to material and cultural riches combine excessively in a desire to (re)understand the other and his own self, Maurizio Pellegrin explores and forms dialogues – in complete contemporaneity – with ancient traditions and ancestral memories of cultures with fates completely different from his own, perhaps with the primordial desire of discovering (or at least observing) the most profound of these “others”, and sometimes himself.
An almost anthropologist/entomologist work of the interior and exterior, of the traveler in perpetuum and the relentless discoverer of other cultures and traditions, Pellegrin accomplishes an on-going research parallel to his own heritage and customs. It is the study of a Venice marked by historic exchanges that are not only material, but also vivid with symbolic significance. Furthermore, Pellegrin also situates himself in an ancient and modern gnoseologic tradition, in this case, a Greco-Latin and Western one.
With both contrasting and complementary studies of visual arts, philosophy, literature, sociology, coupled with exceptional knowledge of religion, faith and metaphysical ancestral and contemporary aspects, inasmuch Western as Eastern, Pellegrin is represented as a fantastic “installer” in the current international panorama of contemporary visual arts. The generation of dialogue and coexistence, but most of all the interaction (sometimes tense, other times fluid, although almost always elliptical, extremely metaphorical), between natural or manufactured, organic or industrial, ancient or modern materials, all with implicit or explicit charges, are almost always complementary rather than conflicting or irreconcilable.
Therefore the same appropriation of architectural spaces with differing functions – palaces, churches, museums – or with differing aesthetical imprints – Renaissance and Baroque structures as far as functionalism or postmodernism – are now bursting with Pellegrin’s notable spatial interventions or site specific installations. We feel and perceive this subtle, though sometimes profound, interaction between complexes and sometimes clearly philosophical, multicultural and existential references – from Pythagorean numerology to ancient and medieval (Neo)Platonism, to cosmology of the Renaissance and contemporary phenomenology, to Zen Buddhism and other important cultural and religious aspects of traditional Chinese, Hindu or African millenniums.
However, despite the symbolic complexity of these references, of which Pellegrin allows for interaction in his interventions and installations, we are able to view and establish narrow links between different, very dissimilar signs and cognitive elements. Through these elements, the public, in various ways, can exchange experiences and all-encompassing emotions with the artist himself and his proposals – from the most codifying and conceptual reflection to the most intuitive and visceral contemplation. Both are marked and overcome by the empathetic, captivating visuality of the spaces and connections that Pellegrin establishes in the dialogue between the contrasting objects.
Everything is balanced, though sometimes Pellegrin’s installations are tense, an immense and unexhaustive polysemia filled with latent meanings, very different among themselves. Bearing this in mind, the spectator finds himself understanding, interpreting or merely enjoying the ambiguous interpretations that emanate from the objects and the spatial and audiovisual interactions that are proposed to us in each specific context by the artist.
Therefore Trilogies, the suggestive site specific installation realized by Maurizio Pellegrin for the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo, is composed of always intimate, organic materials (rice, earth, kimono, shirt, Japanese obi, binoculars, etc) together with two dependent but complementary videos that contrast tranquillity and tradition against the menace and violence of contemporary technology. In some ways they constantly leave us with trails to follow – and faith – in those spatial and objectual exchanges with which Pellegrin allows for continuity in those intense multicultural and existential reflections that mark his vital trajectory as an artist.