Miranda Mc Clintic
Isole
 
in “Art in America"
New York, March, 2006
 

Maurizio Pellegrin’s Isole was a completely unprecedented exhibition organized by a contemporary artist simultaneously in all eight Venetian state museums. The show was a cumulative experience: an insider’s tour of Venice that revealed the history of the city intersecting with the experience and imagination of the artist. Isole – “islands” in Italian – refers to geographic, psychological, and conceptual islands that are evoked and over-layered throughout the exhibition. This title also relates to Pellegrin’s preferred compositional technique of isolating emblematic forms in contextual arrangements. Born in Venice in 1956, and now living there and in New York, Maurizio Pellegrin is a world traveler, who brings back treasures like explorers of old. He transforms appropriated cultural and natural artifacts through the use of numerological systems derived from Pythagoras and the Jewish Kabala and colors chosen for specific philosophical implications and psychological effects.
For Isole, walking sticks, boxes, clothing, and fans from Japan, China and the United States were incorporated into installations on walls, floors, and atop antique furniture. Pellegrin combines photographs (mostly vintage), curious historical objects and old master religious paintings – accented by strategically placed pieces of strongly colored fabric -- with his own fiber sculpture and short films.
These compilations reflect an artist who is acutely responsive to both his local and his global surroundings. Each separately titled piece directly related in multiple ways to its splendid architectural location, transporting our minds through time and space. Taken together, they attest to the continuity of past and present, near and far, life and death.
At the Museum of Oriental Art, orange ribbon was used to highlight both Samurai weapons from the collection and Japanese writing brushes that Pellegrin had installed on the opposite wall, placing the ancient arts of war and calligraphy in vivid confrontation. A rhythmic arrangement of ribbons and tightly wound balls of orange thread led the viewer upstairs to other subtle additions and rearrangements of the historical objects that constituted Pellegrin’s art of intervention. At the Doge’s Palace, Impermanence and Transmigration, consists of a film featuring the artist dressed in Chinese clothes and a floor arrangement of objects symbolizing a man,
a woman and their relationship. This engaging environment included a self-portrait of the artist in costume, one of many that appear throughout Isole, adding empathy and humor. My favorite among these theatrical portrayals is a photograph of Pellegrin in a World War I fighter pilot’s goggles and helmet that is surrounded by old model airplanes in a bright red wall assemblage at the International Gallery of Modern Art.
Every installation in Isole stood conceptually and visually on its own, and interrelated with all the others iconographically, historically, and narratively.
In the handsome exhibition brochure and catalogue that accompany the show Pellegrin made clear that there are specific associations accompanying the objects he chooses, the numbers determining the spirit of each piece, and the few colors he selects. Black – the traditional color of gondolas and of death -- often predominated, forcefully contrasted with pure white, imperial orange, vibrant green, or deeply saturated red, which he regards as the “color of energy and movement.”
Maurizio Pellegrin’s art is distinguished by haunting imagery, elegant proportion, metaphoric conceptualism, and exquisite craftsmanship. It is both tactile and poetic, with an empathetic human presence. Formal in composition, all the installations of Isole are responsive and respectful to their contexts. They seduce the viewer, rather than dazzle or confront.