Enzo Di Martino
A Dissonant Dialogue with Art of the Past
Isole, a project by Maurizio Pellegrin
 
in “Il Gazzettino"
Venice, September 3rd, 2005
 

A complex and intriguing exhibition, dense with formal, cultural and emotive references, involves eight museums in the city. The operation exhibited by Maurizio Pellegrin (Venice, 1956), curated by Alice Rubbini, turns out to be quite interesting because he configures a difficult, yet harmonious, dialogue between art of the past, realities of museums, and transgressive and deliberately dissonant interventions by a contemporary artist. Naturally the enterprise merits a great deal of attention, but it is important at least to point out his interventions at the Museo Correr.
Tracce dell’Essere in the monumental-sized room in the Biblioteca Marciana, is composed of a series of glass ampullas inside of which Pellegrin has placed various stiff collars from used shirts, a sponge colored bright red and old cigar mouthpieces. Hanging from the ceiling are several animal bones, remains precisely of a life that is no longer. But the interventions in the collection are those that testify to the most ideal, and perhaps “impotent”, discussion with painting of the past, using paintings from his private collection. In the room of Antonello da Messina, Pellegrin has placed one of his small Spanish Seventeenth century crucifixes, surmounted by two surprising, old carpenter saws. Or a painting of the school of Jacopo Palma of which he has hung strings that sustain several objects, among which is a tribal drum.
And still, the face of Christ is partially bandaged in black next to the Carpaccio’s celebrated Cortigiane. It is as one can see, without considering other interventions in the different museums (photography, installations and film projections), a sort of “appropriation” of history and art history by Pellegrin, and the affirmation of the continuity, in the diversity, of creative and expressive demonstrations.