Maurizio Pellegrin (EN)

Maurizio Pellegrin belongs to the rare category of intellectual artists and holds a unique place within the contemporary art scene: too realist in philosophy to be considered a typical conceptual, too cosmopolitan to indulge in some vernacular art (at most his home-town, Venice, offers him a bridge towards an Orient influencing the West by zenization), too culturally and aesthetically refined to encroach upon Pop, Minimal or Arte Povera experiences.
He subtly operates along the ridge between realism and abstraction. From the world in its givenness he draws the materials that he lets resemble the phenomenic datum, but deriving from it an energy that witnesses its vitality and fascination. He does not photograph reality, but invents an evocative realism, thus avoiding the illustration of the object. The effect of the images thus composed is highly aesthetical, communicative and cathartic, so that no confirmation through the comparison with reality itself is needed.
Big-sized assemblages made up by objects or their fragments form stately icons, and not simple archives or catalogues of a partial memory. In these works, the world is neither illustrated nor narrated, but rather divined and shown as it is given in a phenomenological and existential sense. Pellegrin, by his refined artistic work brings a new order into the effectual, chaotic and dispersive reality of things, and incorporates also elements of disorder, chance and instinctual nature. A piece of reality resuming a phenomenic fragment, reconstructed by memory, appears in a form that strikes by its “ontological” force – as if objects would learn to exist within the new order in which the artist lets them hold a dialogue in space. And together with them, through the impact of the work, it is man who learns to be, not only in space, but also in time thanks to memory that gives him the sense of continuity and an identity.