Filippo Fossati
The Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole
 
New York, 2006
 

The title of this essay is obviously not casual and is gathered from at least two sources that from my point of view have to do closely with the art and life of Maurizio Pellegrin.
Desire and the pursuit of the whole is a saying and a phrase by Plato, Socrates' student and the teacher of many, including Pellegrin, from the moment that both believe that in life and in art there is no need to take into maximum account the living or behaving as such, but living and behaving well . Probably these issues are what Frederick William Rolfe, known as Baron Corvo (1860 - 1913) held true as he used the phrase as a title for his book on Venice, the city in which he lived dramatically in the dawn of World War I (The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Romance of Modern Venice).
I pause a moment on Venice because, aside from being the astonishing wonder of art and history that we can visit and admire, it is also the city where Maurizio Pellegrin was born and raised. I say this to speak of the heritage and of the fortuitousness of which the artist is certainly aware and grateful. It is obvious that he knows walking within the walls constructed by famous architects, where adventurers and travellers, artists and musician, writers and actors, sailors and merchants, kings and queens and courts that served them, a multitude of human variety in other words,
all scattered within the confines of a space that for centuries has changed little or nothing. Venice is the ideal stage for any representation, a scenery in continual movement where one does not have to travel far to be greatly enriched; it is the city of art as a challenge and as risk and not only a departure point, but above all a place of travel, trade and transit.
The surroundings permit a continuous research, not to be confused with the relentless quest that an artist continues to wander without finding, because on the contrary, the wandering of Maurizio isn't a search, but more of a continual discovery made of curiosity, the desire to know, the interest for rarity, peculiarity, the new. The operation that he completes is that of discovering things on his path; things that he is looking for and that are waiting for him, without knowing how and where the meeting will occur. The preparation happens following a ritual that brings him to travel by tempestuous seas and desolate lands, often alone and occasionally in company. Once found what he has been searching for, each object will manifest a demon and an eye proper to each reality and such that will look at the human being in a different dimension. It is the inquisitiveness that will give justice to a physical and temporal distance that the men of this century don't want to accept; the distance of man from the objects and the autonomy of the objects from man. Then the exploration is not a pure and simple adventure, but an act which involves the sense of nostalgia and solitude. Erotic, heretic, errant. With the obvious consideration of sensuality, consider the body of what the artist is looking for (and looks for bodily), of the ideas that he doesn't want evoked, but possessed and transferred in solid compositions, of the excitement of the apparitions, of the volume of the object, of the structure and so on. It is necessary for Maurizio Pellegrin to be able to express how much he has to say with a proper physical certainty. In the artworks, as within the lyrical texts which he writes, the prominent aspect is really the personal language and the pronunciation of what he says, the rhythm, the sound, the wave and the consequent emotions.
In respect to his contemporaries - and I am thinking to the Arte Povera group,
to the painters of the 80s and 90s, and the fashionable art of 2000 - the work of Pellegrin seems to me not to seek an idea or sentiment about the art of his time, but to follow an itch, a desire and an appetite not even well concealed. And because the best way to liberate desires and itches is to cultivate them in a suitable manner,
here is Maurizio moving the attention from the game to the work and he starts drawing with an uninterrupted variation of spaces and environments, that for him have not only a "monumental" worth, but also a childish imagination. They are an extension of fantasy suitable to pictorial terms. They implicate the idea of materialization of a pictorial process into space. In his work there is the notion of growth of a pictorial world that is not just on the surface of the canvas, but in which travelling is of primary importance, leafing through the pages, accumulating.
To conceive art and the totality of its process as the whole of a living organism that owes its life to the sum "of the reciprocal actions between the single processes of the elements that organize it," as Italian critic Tommaso Trini states, is as Maurizio says, quotidian and tribal art . On first look it may seem that there is an unresolved tension between the stable material of the architectures that he builds and equips, but in realty every object has its own precise position and its own reason to be. That Maurizio's painting is astutely built is what many art critics that follow his work support, but here I add that it is built with a mix of operational knowledge or manipulation of the parts, which is the very particular syntax of his discourse.
On the wall he has hung an object and he is talking to me about the relationship of spaces and energies, here, he says, you can see the stories that are already inside jump out. But which stories? Where? The vicissitude of Maurizio Pellegrin concerning the stories that hide in things have an uneven development.
The structure agitates and the surface bubbles, pieces of furniture, collections of gloves or neck-ties spread and solidify three dimensionally.
Then there is the question about materials, of the various materials of which the objects and the artworks are made, that are objects, signals, density, multiplication of planes and all of what is ephemeral, lyric and pictorial that enrich them. It is then necessary to point out that each of the parts that compose the work; fragment or splinter, plug or tile, trace or imprint, is not more than an indication. A memory of places, moods, lives. Masks, scrolls, photographs, oars, hats, skeins of yarn, toys and everything else, are pieces chosen to compose a game of junctions, divisions, sharing. The indications that every human being carries within himself are there prepared and ordered as part of a plot, of a wider tale. Because the materials matter to a certain extent while what remains evident is the journey, the making of the tale. It is not said that the narration has to be linear or that the plot continues uninterrupted, on the contrary the very case of Maurizio Pellegrin demonstrates a complexity of directions and a remarkably rich growth.
It seems that I could say that in Maurizio's case the tale plays with the parts that compose it in a way to distract attention from a merely physical assessment filled with returns and allusions. Not just quotations but moods, atmospheric mood,
that have all "the tenderness and the affection of a deposited breath of the painting over an organic body sculpturally defined." I've already mentioned painting more than once and I observe how this reckless and sharp manner of narrating involves an idea of realty and of the world that is at the least dubious. So dubious as to make Maurizio Pellegrin put together artworks that substitute how much that is disordered and torn apart that are offered each day, kindness and elegance included. In this panorama, art is decisive because the experience that it communicates or determines doesn't coincide, it doesn't identify with art itself. It wears a mask that shows it's indirect belonging to the present; it places itself in an ancient space with a game of distances that allows to turn upside down optics, not from near to far, not from human to object, but vice-versa.
It will do well finally to pay attention to the mechanism that Maurizio employs in his mise-en-scene and of which one of his first and most ardent exegete, Phil An Derer, has extensively written. Attention that is a kind of internal metric and rhythm of composition and pattern. His artworks have a well-scanned tempo in the way he arranges material, in the way that he plays their reactions, in how he overturns perspective and points of view, in how he determines distances and depths.
The result is a transfer of space, of the watching place; the author attempts to put us in a skewed position and we find ourselves for a moment suspended in a point in which emerges that perception doesn't cull.
"...the meaning of my doing is that I imagine things as a poet and recompose a fragment into unity...That's how it was, that's what it is called the grinding of teeth
of willingness." (Nietzche, Zarathustra)