Giandomenico Romanelli
Pilgrimages of Spiderman*
 
in “Maurizio Pellegrin"
Charta, catalogue of the exhibition, Milan, 2005
 

This time, as for other occasions and circumstances, Maurizio Pellegrin occupies,
in a various and rhapsodic way, places, situations, stories, views, perceptions, atmospheres, climates that are diverse and recurrent, necessary and unique.
Who perceives the cultured minuet is he who weaves both history and space, abandoned forms and signs recalled to significance, obsolescent and displacement, autobiographical and dramatic in invasion and invention, in the everyday and in the liturgy of these museum installations. Because we are talking about museums, because in any case and without a possibility of ambiguity and evasion: choices, researches, courtships, desires, accomplishments. And the nature of museums and collections is neither negated nor concealed: anything but this.
A suspended and poetic dimension marks Pellegrin’s extended and concentrated wunderkammer in a pursuit of naturalia and artificialia, in a pro-vocation that calls upon a relationship, evocation and denouncement, camouflage and parusia.
I like Pellegrin’s light and discreet, submissive qualities; I share his anti-invasive angle, the essence of a suspended and polyphonic dialogue, the plurality of the keys, the shrewd lay-out of his anti-rhetoric, ironic, passionate, insinuating orations.
But what is more fascinating and almost provocative is the understatement of a cultural and poetic operation that leans towards minimalia and monumenta, the essence of myth and the dimension of a flaccid hat, the tragedy of some sort of Oedipus and the fate of an exceptional sardine, the banality of an Egyptian pyramid and ineluctability of a rubber pacifier, the roll of twine and an endless milky way. Pellegrin does not fear such combinations, or retreat from them as others would in the face of the measurement of time and space of a museum, its meaning in definite essence, in the three-dimensionality of history and art history, in the poetic statement and in the discouragement of aesthetics.
In conclusion, there is an unavoidable necessity time and time again for assembly and dosage, essentiality and redundance, linearity and pleasure, meanders and riboboli and bends and meati that brings the oblique, maze-like geometry of a mental labyrinth to the intersection of impossible choices, to the poetic speech of a wise orator.
This time, the orator unfurls his speech inside the same aura, not just of a museum but of an entire system of conservation and of historic and art historic proposals, winding in his spider-web between objects and texts, between shreds of memories and artistic signs, between de-contextualized religious scenes and bachelor machines, between captions and poetic explosions, and not just these: this spider-web flows out like the web of Spiderman and travails the streets and open spaces, spanning large distances, and perhaps time, in order to surround and capture,
or to liberate and reveal, to continue the tiresome game of creativity, duplicating it, soliciting it, putting it in check, evoking infinite variations, useless necessities, betrayed rules, possible destinies, happy death and painful and lacerated resurrections.
A pilgrim* of art travels unknown itineraries and opens unexpected passageways in order to see inside and across, beyond, before and after; in fact, it is he who possesses the magic keys to secret passages.

Notes

* “Pellegrino” can be literally translated from Italian as “pilgrim”. As such, the author plays with the double meaning of this word, the author’s last name, Pellegrin, and the comparison of his actions to that of a pilgrim.