Lisa Paul Streitfeld
Maurizio Pellegrin: Beauty and Trascendence
 
in “Sculture"
Vol. 24 No. 6, July / August, 2005
 

Maurizio Pellegrin’s sculptural installations transport the viewer/participant through time and across unspecified borders. The art of this itinerant traveller and collector of objects reflects the long history of cultural fusion in his native Venice, maritime crossroads between East and West. His holistic approach to installation integrates past and present as it newly defines the aesthetic edge between permanence and temporality. “I have a fascination with the object, aesthetically, because I like collecting. The memory leaves traces,” he says, “new order gives new function and new energy to the object. Sometimes I wrap the object. I like to retain the energy inside”.
Pellegrin was classically trained in Drawing and Painting that Academy of Fine arts in Venice, where he was born in 1956. He currently lives and the works between his native city and New York, where he studied Sociology and Eastern Philosophy and presently teaches a scientific approach to installation. Out of this eclectic background, Pellegrin has launched a contemporary cross-cultural dialogue. In 1997, he transformed three Venetian rooms through the purposeful arrangement of resonant objects: the Chinese Room with stuffed white walls, umbrellas and tea sets; the Italian Room ordered with lines of scrolls and raw wooden sculptures; and the African Room with its totem figures.
Pellegrin’s transformation of tourist-trampled spaces in his native habitat reflects a personal mythology of longing and renewal. Outside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, he created an elliptical path of apples paired with a variety of hats set inside threaded bundles of bibliographical cards. On a personal level the trail represents the multiple roles the artist must play to give form to his desires. Yet, for the visitors walking the pagoda path, the installation brings new and deeper meaning into the life and residence of the art patron, hinting at her struggle to reconcile the female duality - erotic and nurturing - associated with the forbidden apple of Eden.
Venice, the watery lovers’ paradise, is never far from Pellegrin’s vision: more than a heritage or home, it is a state of being beautiful in the world, and erotic attraction to the unconscious flow of spirit seeping into the body, like the flooded walkways along the canals. In a 1998 solo show, The Water Dream at the Cleveland Centre of Contemporary Art, Pellegrin conveyed this theme through a wall wrapped in nine yards of red padded fabric with a black and white photograph of a gondola in the centre.
In early 2004, Pellegrin’s Works from the 80s to the Present at Esso Gallery in Chelsea reinforced the alchemical process embedded in his holistic philosophy of space and highly developed personal interaction with collect objects. The intricate reordering of materiality through the deliberate arrangement of such items as columns, rushes, photographs, letters, draped fabrics, baskets, dead fish, and wooden assemblages in separate but linked installations infused mystery and magic into the neutral commercial environment. At the root of this is the spiritual power is a profound paradox. Pellegrin’s installations embrace the human scale architecture of his Venice, which, he notes, is dwarfed by the arrival of a large ship. Yet microcosm is linked with macrocosm, the surrounding universe, through symbolic motifs such as Ariadne’s thread – the red yarn connecting objects within a designated space – as well as the interplay of numerology and sacred geometry.
With this ancient references, the contemporary artist engages the universal unconscious through meaningful acts of collaboration with the energy of pre-existing environments. His on-site installation in such heritage-laden spaces has museums or palaces often conspire with classical sculptures or frescos, thereby invigorating a traditional aesthetic with a contemporary philosophy of beauty that is ever changing and connected to life. He also imports rare antiques or resonant everyday objects such a gloves, letters, fabric, and spectacles.
If the identities of additional installation objects are withheld from consciousness, it is because Pellegrin is intent on preserving their essence through the process of wrapping, stencilling, and arranging them on the wall and/or floor in a precise formal manner.
Stencilled numbers have a dual purpose, he explains. “They quantify the energy inside the work, and symbolically, every number has a particular meaning.” In this theatre of shrouded forms vibrating to the quantity and quality of energy, Pellegrin erases function in favour of a universal narrative in which spirit is infused into matter and all life is interconnected. In order to arrive at this holistic destination, however, we are forced to confront our fears of the hidden, the unknown, and the indefinable.
Out of the specificity of this meaningful arrangements arises a philosophy of space addressing a physic malaise of our time: How can we remain routed in our personal history, yet connected to the whole? Pellegrin’s installations are like tracks in the sands of time: surrendering to they mystery we are transported a to the real of imagination.
The wrapped object, in its appearance of negative space, eclipses the light of our consciousness just as the moon may darken the sun. Groping through this textured shadow, we are free to make unconscious connections.
Why do this inhabited spaces seem so familiar? Is it because we have seen photos of them in an art history book? Or could we have passed though them mindlessly as tourists? “There is today the persistent idea of the New. What is the new? It’s a joke. Society creates a conflict between desire and expectation,” the artist declares. “Sometime I am tired of technology. I am going into my soul.”
With this position of defiance, Pellegrin infuses a personal vision into classical forms that liberate humanity anew from external threats to our collective soul.
“I believe everyone has a duty. Mine is working for the sake of knowledge,“ he says. Sculptor, poet, philosopher, teacher, photographer, writer, actor, filmmaker, draftsman, and painter - Pellegrin is a Renaissance man from our time. His holistic art invites renewed reverence for the hidden connections linking us to the rich cultural heritage that we share as humans.