Fred Camper
Maurizio Pellegrin at Carrie Secrist

in “Chicago Reader”
Chicago, March 5th, 2004
 

Maurizio Pellegrin, born in Venice in 1956 and now living in New York and Venice, creates assemblage out of objects he’s collected from around the world , often painting the wall behind them a solid color. In the ten examples on view at Carrie Secrist he creates the same euphoria as Lassman and Simonsen but does it by selecting and arranging objects from his collection with a vision that surpasses that of most museum curators. For The Red Thelephone he places objects (most of them red)-balls of yarn, a felt bag, an old phone-in front of a huge red rectangle he’s painted on the wall. The color intensifies and unifies our experience of the work while the large empty spaces between the objects contribute to Pellegrin’s theme: “Where is the communication?” he asks. “Do we still talk to each other or are we just tools among tools?”
Making art is the subject of The Drawing Panels. Pellegrin sketched five figures in red pencil, then framed and mounted the sketches along with two small hand-shaped objects, rulers, and a T square on three wooden panels he covered with red scribbles. What results is a stunning combination of lines and textures.
At first the freehand, almost random loops of the scribbling, the straightedge tools, and the restrained, controlled lines of the figures seem to clash. Then one starts to see them as connected-to see that the anarchy of the scribbles is a necessary prelude to the controlled drawings.
Pellegrin, who was exposed to Venice’s greatest 16th-century artists while still a boy, discovered Picasso in books when he was about 12 and Rauschenberg at the Venice biennale. Aware of the city’s long tradition in world trade-he mentions Marco Polo- he searches the world for his objects. Drawing on a broad education that includes a bachelor’s in philosophy and literature, a master’s in art, and studies in Buddhism and Zen, Pellegrin is interested in the Chinese idea of “perpetual energy connected with idea of the circle” and in the differences between Asian and Western ideas of space. He began making assemblages around 1986, when he was living in a 17th-century Palladian villa that included a chapel. A remodelling miscalculation years earlier had left part of the foot and of a column from a Christ sculpture protruding through his studio wall, and he “started to arrange objects around these fragments”. Fittingly, what first inspired his assemblages-designed to suggest multiple associations-was the layering of culture and history in Italy.
Pellegrin’s work, which celebrates the joy of looking at things, is not without its humour. For The Lion Stripe he painted a vertical ochre stripe on the wall and let the paint drip into a puddle on the floor, where he placed two small bronzed lion sculptures he’d purchased in China-“the kind of lion that defends you against negative energy”, he says. The stripe has the effect of both poking fun at and celebrating art’s power: by providing the lion hue the original artist left out, Pellegrin wryly suggest that the artist can not only curate but add color to the world.