Orsola Bertini Curri
Fresh Air
 
Venice, 2005
 

Flight New York/Venice: Encountered an artist with a suitcase. A light suitcase,
but full of meanings and projects for his loved Lagoon. A breeze of Fresh Air for a city that chose immobility and, understanding its error, was still fortunate to have been able to count on the help of its “intellectuals” who had escaped during that time. Maurizio Pellegrin’s various interventions are true acts of love. In Isole, his recent project for Venice’s Civic Museums, the artist measures himself with the rooms; he confronts himself, identifying himself in the places imbued with memory of an always more single collectivity. Through painstaking research on his origins, Pellegrin has a created path that unravels between the study of numerology, symbology of colors and emotions of the soul; distant echoes originating from China and Japan, strings and stuffed cloth, give life to an autobiographical journey that analyzes various emotions of the unconscious. The continuity between the past and present, between life and death is affirmed in the spaces chosen by the artist. The installations are composed of assemblages and of the accumulation of objects, of which the artist undergoes the fascination in the course of various journeys.
The disposition of the same elements seems to be casual, but the hidden structure reveals only an illusion of disorder. The ways of his actions are so discreet and only slightly invasive that it seems that his voice is lost in the immense silence of the multitude, thus allowing the singular to intermix and hide within the crowd.
Only the most attentive spectator can understand the delicate meaning of his elegant interventions, as only the most shrewd observer can perceive the forms of a face in the three caps thrown par hasard to the ground in Pieter Bruegel’s well known painting Les Jeux d’enfants.
I also underwent a journey, an inner path that may never end. I explored a world composed of pure beauty, based on objects that strikes the gaze but with the same power, also strikes the heart; and triggers emotions, sentimental storms, Pindaric flights in the most hidden parts of the soul. It is the world of Art, but not the one studied in handbooks. I am speaking of the art present in each one of us, according to the principle that identifies art with life. My encounter with Maurizio was fundamental for this journey. I had the fortune of knowing the Ego who narrates,
the person that disappears and reappears behind the work. And I asked myself what he would be made of. He is made of history, of time, which is filled by a biography that is history, narration. His art gathers the memory and permanence of things;
it is an accumulation of energies that stem from the past; it is detached from the quotidian that, with unmeasured fantasy, brings you beyond the elevated degree of knowing and creating. If art can only be called “art” if it is inserted in a system that permits it live thanks to the work of artists, critics, gallerists, curators and conservators, each one of us takes refuge in it because it is the only real open and permissible space that our society leaves for individual expression. The ritual art is revealed in the artistic life, in the lived and in the places that delegate them.
If Arcadia is a myth, it relives in art and like all myths, it encourages us, helps us understand and decipher the codes of our emotions. It is enough to dive in deep waters and cradle ourselves in its illusions. New ideas will inundate us and returning to float, we will breathe in Fresh Air for our everyday lives.