Alice Rubbini
Writings on Maurizio Pellegrin
 
Skira, Milan , 2006
 

I first met Maurizio Pellegrin at the beginning of the Nineties in occasion of an article I had to write on his work for a magazine. At the time, he had recently concluded his Roman “residency” and was already living between Venice and New York; from there we began to meet more often, fortunately working in the art world provided us with this opportunity. Many years have past since then, so many that by now we’ve become so different yet nothing has changed in our transformation. We are still who we were, the familiarity, friendship and shared thoughts have kept us in the weightlessness of a suspended time (that actually isn’t), wrapped in an apparent invariability, as if we were inside of a book or a film. Someone once said, “…with a certain part of our being, we all live out-of-time. Maybe it’s only in exceptional moments that we realize how old we really are, while most of the time we are
age-less” (1). Maybe it’s because we still want to joke around and at least in ourselves, we only see what we want, through every memorable moment – those intense ones, those we’ve given value to even though they constitute our normal everyday lives. It can happen, right? It can happen that we resume dreaming at the precise moment we awoke from them, that we can rarely see each other and then meet again as if it were yesterday, that we can happy because the time that has past hasn’t been useless. Sometimes we are led to believe that we have been given an instant of immortality, so much that we can embroider ourselves on a piece of our existence, and therefore we can meet again without being amazed at how we really are, because it is more important for us to recognize ourselves in what we’ve done and in the projects we have for the future.
To write about Maurizio Pellegrin has always been a challenge for me, where I needed to focus on the contents without disappointing both myself as well as our friendship. So, among the many words I’ve written, perhaps I have never said what I really like about his work, because I think I was intent on distinguishing and attempting to explain the thousands of meanings of his work. Though I must admit that these thousands of meanings are the reason for this first fascination that I experience, at least as superficial as aesthetic. The indisputable beauty of many of his works, as well as the roughness of certain objects that compose them, depart from the intelligibility of emotions.
Going beyond every conceptual nuance, every membership and literary-historic-artistic relationship on which we can advance ourselves almost to infinity,
I appreciate the simple complexity of the whole, or rather the intuitive accessibility that induces in various levels of the work’s interpretation. The instinct doesn’t result in disorientation, even though it doesn’t recognize the real significance of the composition because it just takes some small fragments to cling onto in order to expand it with the imagination. I am persuaded by the ability he has to give importance to things that aren’t important to me until that very moment. I like to study and to recognize the elements that distinguish the evolution of the work,
its formal and chromatic progression, which constantly acquires new substance through time, as if following the process of a meditative discipline that aspires to “circular” perfection. Therefore I admire and without shame, I envy this “easy” precision that naturally doesn’t belong to me and that, precisely for this reason, brings me to retain what should be the right distance from the work and that introduces spontaneous and reserved contemplation. The time that is captured in the objects, in the photographs, in films, he puts it back in play (in terms of fruition) and every tension, like that which for his own nature has in itself, becomes filtered by a pensive desire. I admit that at times, I am in awe in front of certain works because I can almost touch the sense of memory and the poetry of remembrance found in those things. This is something that I would have never been able to see if these things had only been in my hands and if these objects weren’t knowingly connected to each other. It stimulates me to try to know, to understand, to find, to give a name to all of those feelings that inevitably resurface, accompanied by that strong but incumbent, non-transgressing aesthetic dimension. He even amazes himself, but nothing neglects or changes the love that I have for painting and figuration, for the tendencies and the classical references to which I relate, since for me his works are also part of this. I am not able to live his work as something so incredibly different from that which has been my formative growth in the contemporary visual art; or rather, what is known to me, reassures me, and what is unknown to me, enriches me. Therefore I need to esteem such a strong identity, an identity that has traveled an independent path with winning determination.
And at the same time, I envy him because for him, art is as innate as irony, which he knows how to use wisely in his work and his life because he never loses concentration on things. So therefore I don’t want you to think of this book as just a book, but as one of his works to hold in your hands, to read and to leaf through.
It is composed of words and images in black and white, and scanned from pages that date the evolution of an extremely defined work, yet always a work in progress, marked by a particular intelligence and by a passionately, restless life.
What you will go onto read here represents the experience of his artistic presence in the world put together piece by piece, one after the other, following the chronology of events. This structure of the book underlines his perfect order, it reflects on his education, his culture and character, and therefore it isn’t simple formal exhibition but an existential necessity. Each page travels the variations of his creative path, reflecting on the emotions, the sensations, the interpretations of other views; fascinating, skeptical, curious and critical, but always important views.
The non-verbal communication offered from the images complements and underlines the need to be able to view his thoughts while the words stream, speaking of works, of instincts and fantasies, of loved places and chosen spaces, of important events, of unforgettable presences. Words seduced by a wise and innate storyteller, yes Pellegrin, an inductor of visual thoughts and verbal reverberations; an excellent diver in billows of the farthest nostalgia; an author that has inspired a renewed spirit in those old (but also antique and precious) objects, which then take body in his art. However this time, the collection shifts to evidence of his artistic activities, to those writings, excerpts, articles and reviews that are fragments of an on-going thirty year discussion, gathered during a career that adds up to hundreds of personal exhibitions and even more collectives realized throughout the world. New York and the United States recognized the value of Maurizio Pellegrin’s work already from 1988, with his presence in the Venice Biennial, and he has always maintained the interests in his conquered successes. The dimension of this part of his existence has inevitably left space to individuality and the process of making has sustained the measure of existence. This represented a frenetically satisfying life that taught him a lot and a lot in a short amount of time, since everything in New York is extremely amplified but everything has the opportunity to be realized, while Venice, the identity from which he began, in reality continues to mark a “point of return”.
It is the place that brings him back to himself more than any other place and that certainly renews his desire to leave. It doesn’t indicate an escape but a loss of himself in order to rediscover himself, a kind of game of his own life, that forgets time until the point of almost annulling it, because in this singular microcosm, the present continually overlaps itself in infinite memories. Therefore, this book becomes a particular and unique photograph of his own identity seen from various angles and with long exposure times. We shouldn’t think of this as an self-referential gesture, but as attention and consideration for the work and the opinion of who has lived and lives the contemporary art world, and has stopped himself, at least once, to look at his work. Thus in making, Pellegrin is able to wisely cancel the effective moment of occurrences in order to bring everything back to a single interpretation, giving us back the poetry of things said and made lighter by the tangibility of the present.
The power of time is that of giving and taking everything, in good or in bad, of softening the angles sharp with memory, of making us pursue life itself and of deluding ourselves that this will never finish. This is why the author returns every thing to the undefineability of a suspended time composed of emotions and feelings. The image of the whole indicates the path towards the synthesis and the significance of things, and his continual research of suggestions, where the recomposed situation again becomes an event (the same event that has been described many times), concentrates itself on this “single” omnivorous glance of sensations. Each one here has left determinant indications between the lines of his own thought; each one has contributed to strengthening the power of reflection,
of doubt, of introspection, underlining the best of those “years of experiences and development, of theft and ambush with life, encounters, challenges and rebellion, of joy but also of sadness, affronted with dignity that only artists know” (2).

Notes

(1)- Milan Kundera, Immortality, Harper:Perrenial, New York, 1999)

(2) - Maurizio Pellegrin, Letter to his father, thinking about the works for Venice, Milan, July, 2005)