Alessandra Artale
Venice and her Islands.
The autobiographical city between the past and present

in “La Nuova Venezia"
Venice, September 3rd, 2005
 

To speak of islands in Venice doesn’t seem very original, but never make judgments based on first impressions. Isole is a great unified work by Maurizio Pellegrin,
a sensitive and eclectic artist, which snakes through the eight Venetian museums where, for each, he has conceived and realized a specific work: installations, film, sculpture and photography. Isole speaks of the artist, as well as the places and spaces that he has chosen to present his works. Together they speak of Venice,
of the continuity between the past and the present, of her hidden life. An elegant work, like the city herself: a Venice that is not only a container of events and works originating from abroad, but a laboratory. Isole touches, with its sections, the spirit and body, the drive of the soul and the mind, in an autobiographical vision of the artist in relation to the different states of matter and spirit. The unusual and fascinating project unfolds, until November 6th, at the Museo Correr, the Marciana Library, Palazzo Ducale, Ca’ Pesaro, Palazzo Mocenigo, Museo Storico Navale, Museo Orientale and Ca’ Rezzonico, where the opening took place yesterday evening. Each section has a particular theme, tied a color and to a number, in a contamination with the Oriental culture and esoteric doctrines. At the Museo Correr, Lo Spazio terzo, the principal color is black which esoterically defends from negative energies and the bearer of mourning only in Western culture. Instead for Eastern culture, white is the symbolic color of death. Here then, the third space as communication between life and death, between the past and present in antique paintings bound by black gauze, ending at masterpieces by Antonello da Messina or by Vivarini. It is a symbiosis between masterpieces of the past and contemporary gesture. And also at the Palazzo Ducale, the black and white film It was an Impossible Love is projected on the beautiful armoire of the Sala dei Cuoi, with an installation of a large white canvas stuffed on the floor, on which Chinese and Japanese epochal objects were laid: the works subtend an event, underlining the idea of space and time. At Ca’ Pesaro red triumphs, a color that guides the energies, regulated by the number five according to the Hebrew Kabalah. At Ca’ Rezzonico instead there is a series of 550 black and white photographs, the majority originating in the United States, from the Nineteenth century and the beginning of the Twentieth century, mounted on original photographic cardboard, representing portraits of men, women and children. It is work on memory though without the reliquary nature whose sole function is the memory or the history research: the elements placed in a state of relation or conflict carry out a dynamic bearer of new life and the work is reborn and again becomes current in its development.
The chosen color is green, the principal of new life, and the number eight, infinity and perpetual retracing. White is the protagonist, together with skeins of thread, at the Palazzo Mocenigo, like black canvas and a four-minute film is the one at the Museo Navale: here the principal idea is the obsession of being. In the Museo d’Arte Orientale, the museum which above all other has its “soul”, 120 spheres of orange thread climbs on the black steps of the stairs around the collection of swords. It is a continuous gesture that suggests the multiplication of being in each of its forms and states.