Max Pellegrini: A Tribute

MARIO RASETTI

 

Max Pellegrini is an artist who speaks also to scientists. This is why I - a theoretical physicist who investigates the laws of the world of quanta and of complex systems, trying to understand how they can give rise to intelligence and life - accepted with joy the proposal of writing these few pages after long looking at the eight wonderful paintings of Max, venturing into an exercise so far from my expertise. Why? Because in the narrative structure of those paintings is encoded a message, which emerges out of the subtle and articulated entanglement of a drawing that is essential, clean and clear, and of such simplicity and beauty to enchant, yet succeeds in telling complex stories, made of fractures and discontinuities often disturbing, and is hidden a code that whoever does science can and wants to decipher: to understand the complex articulations of those spaces that the tale of the paintings proposes, distant from each other but identified in their representation, in a geometry which is ineffable (as Borges would have said) and of that time, moving forward and backward, not constrained by the laws of entropy but by the manifold metaphors of the storytelling. Like travelers pushed by a profound anxiety to cross the boundaries of a land unconceivable for all others, to unveil its mysterious laws. This is, perhaps, why the scientists of Pellegrini are shamans, carriers of the complex system of beliefs and behaviors of their exoteric culture, which however intrigues ‘hard’ science.

To define which is the key for Max Pellegrini’s works is like to explain to someone extraneous to eastern culture what is the deep meaning of haiku: “an immense practice devoted to suspend the language,” as Roland Barthes wrote, not stopping it on silence, but rather enunciating something that must not develop itself in the discourse nor in the absence of a discourse, but in a somewhere else which in those two possibilities is only enciphered. In the canvases of Pellegrini the language of which the valence fails is the set of all those superstructures, stratified along centuries of memory, which see the work of an artist as a goal; the unassailable point of arrival of an unrepeatable experience. An haiku made of colors, of images, of the equilibrium of shapes and shadows: how not to recall then that Jorge Luis Borges who, in La otra muerte writes “He adivinado y registrado un proceso no accesible a los hombres, una suerte de escándalo de la razón.”

One of the most dramatic discontinuities in the history of mathematics was, in 1931, the statement by the eminent Austrian mathematical logician Kurt Gödel of his famous “theorem of incompleteness”, which appeared as an open wound to the side of mathematics because it formally proved that there exist theorems that cannot be proved. Five years later the British mathematician Alan Turing, conceiving the idea of a universal computer able to perform all the operations of any conceivable computing machine, a sort of almighty computational mind, showed that also for that machine there exist operations that it cannot calculate; in particular there is no set of instructions that, given to a computer, allows it to establish a priori whether or not a given program will reach its end. If we want to discover if a program will halt - say, after an infinitesimal fraction of a second, a day, a week, or a billion years - the only thing to do is to start it and wait. Sixty years passed before the Russian-American computer scientist Gregory Chaitin found himself facing this same problem, in a form different and perhaps even more disturbing: Chaitin considered the infinite set of all programs that a universal Turing machine can operate and asked himself which would be the probability that a program chosen randomly in such set would arrive to its end. The number that expresses such probability is called Omega: well, Omega - as Chaitin proved - is incomputable. Once more the problem whether a program can get to its end is undecidable; Omega is the elusive Almot’hasim of Borges’ story, inaccessible also to the most compelling logic of our thoughts. Today we know from the neurosciences that that marvelous, irreproducible machine which is the human brain is able to execute operations (‘programs’) that a Turing machine is unable to perform.

The canvases of Max Pellegrini are a little like the search of Omega: sophisticated algorithms written in an alphabet, only apparently simple, of elegant images and delicate colors, they encode an enigmatic multiplicity of possible choices, which stir in me when I observe them, trying to decipher the elusive cryptogram they hide, the perception of an unlimited multiplicity of options. There is, in those pictures, the same enigma as in this number with infinitely many algorithmic relations, which opens a boundless combinatorial multiplicity of parallel interpretative worlds, the more arcane in that innumerably complex: codes within codes, like matryoshkas that hide a mystery - but disentangleable - and an infinity - yet, perhaps, cognizable - both not univocal. One feels that every allusive character, every choice of color, every object of magical look has a deep reason, but belonging to a different wisdom, difficult to tap into. Every painting contains the mystery of the mysteries of intelligence, which can be exhausted only in an infinite number of interpretations.

The representation emerging from the tales told by Max in his paintings is a sort of self-referential algorithm, which reveals its own hidden contradictions, and just for this, paradoxically unveils its own paradoxes but also the concealed mechanisms of organization, thus affirming itself as a marker of consciousness, of the capacity of reflecting upon ourselves and the fragility of our perception of information.

The work of Pellegrini is closer to the borgesian Library of Babel than to the One, No One and One Hundred Thousand of Pirandello. It is a sort of catalog of catalogues, it is a space-time of irreducible beauty, which in some enigmatic way contains in itself all paintings, even those which have never been painted, because it is a cryptographic code which only who generated its ‘arcane, outrageous idiom’ will ever be able to fully decipher with respect to an interpretation mechanism that exclusively encloses into itself the “data” of the story it is telling. It is therefore undecidable and, in some way, incognizable, as the most complex of all theorems.

I believe that in the paintings of Max Pellegrini there is the tangible negation of the hypothesis that art could only be memory and as such irreversible collection of knowledge. It is instead a memory similar to that of biology, which continuously reconstructs itself, even though - just like an organism does - with the necessity of destroying parts of its self (there is a beautiful, fatal word of Greek etymology to express with discretion this programmed death of cells: apoptosis).

Other aspects of Pellegrini’s art work intrigue a scientist who happens to observe it. Max’s paintings are a true complex system: one should not be misled by the limpid clarity of the lines, by the somehow disturbing regularity of the figures; it is a sum of parts whose global properties do not correspond to the properties defined by the single components, and just in this way it generates a real structure. In the latter, the messages are constructed by means of iterative processes of reflective abstraction; procedures which are proactive because they are dynamical, articulated systems of transformations which reproduce themselves regenerating each other in genealogies of transformations, as much more authentic as they are expressed in explicit operative manner. The basic notion of transformation suggests here the other, much more subtle, of shaping - a message that oversteps space and time, classification of classifications - and therefore of self-construction.

In the paintings of Pellegrini, dreams are not what the analysts of human psyche pay attention to: here the image of a single instant is lived as a continuous narrative, a swirling cascade of information, a dense and cryptic sequence of events. What we see when we look at a painting is a single image, but this is not what we perceive and remember. What remains impressed in our memory is a process, not a single photogram, and the more the image is clear and harmonious the more it is indecipherable or, at the least, ambiguous. Like when we look at the incredible drawings of turbulent water flow by Leonardo, but in a space which is not the space of physics but that of dreams. Memory holds only the indecipherability of the dynamics, not the fleeting moment represented.

The eight paintings are ample and luminous, airy and deep, so much so as to appear as the joyous tale of a pleasant dream, never of a nightmare. And like in a dream each image is a representation of something that must not be deciphered: one needs only to acknowledge it, entering the language it belongs to. In this sense that image is pure seduction (provided one doesn’t reject it), but it is not a message; it is narrative, it doesn’t make entropy decrease, and you perceive that that image is not only the instantaneous and certainly ‘virtuoso’ depiction of an event already happened, but it is the encoded transmission of a story that maybe occurred or perhaps will take place. On the one hand this reminds us the surprising experiments of Francisco Varela on ‘ambiguous pictures’; on the other it is a sort of new symbolism, made of citations of elegant chromatic taste, but of a touch - anarchically provocative and upsetting - of Dada as well.

Also the time variable enters into play, both in every single canvas as in the complex of all paintings of Max Pellegrini, but it is a sort of circular time, where the ‘arrow of time’ which shows to us where is the past and where the future, is missing. Anthropology tells of various cultures that perceive time as cyclic, for example the American Indians Hopi, or the Australian aborigines, but even - it appears - the cultures of Stone Age. The tacit implication that these populations were trapped within a curious mental bending of time over itself, by the essentially mystical meaning, is what the story tells us. There is instead a quite definite sense of pure poetry in the circularity of Pellegrini’s representation: it is an eternal bridge, symbolizing by the metaphor (ubiquitous in mathematics!) of the infinity of the circle with respect to that of the line. The circle, symbol of continuous renewal and rebirthing, traditionally represented - for its capacity of changing skin - by the snake, always present, self-knotted and still, in Pellegrini’s canvases, as a symbol that can lead to immortality.

It is the endless return of thought onto itself, which inexorably pushes it back to its starting point, in a flow process always equal to itself but also always different: like Bach’s “perpetual” canons (7 and 8 of the Regis Jussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta of the Musical Offering), which essentially don’t have an end. With a subtle game of the keys, these canons can be repeated indefinitely, because the final beat naturally brings back to the beginning, with only an imperceptible variation - that implies taking note of an increased knowledge of the world and of ourselves - in the Steinian rule of “explanation by repetition”. The ancestral question about how space, time and matter are made and how they are correlated, that finds there its poetic answer; in the paintings of Max has a possible translation in images.

The philosophical debate on space and time was still raging at the time of Pellegrini’s youth; when it was focused on the dialectic juxtaposition between two giants of philosophy of the years from xviii and xix centuries. One, Immanuel Kant had come to consider space and time as two metaphysical entities, belonging to an aesthetical type that was not concerned, obviously, with the beautiful but with the absolute sensible: the intelligence of senses. The other, was naturally Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Indeed, whereas Kant considered space and time as objective prerequisites for subjective knowledge, intuitively apprehended through one’s senses and not as an interior enlightening, Hegel thought about them as fundamental components of matter, of which also the subject is part. A dramatic overturning of perspective, which from subjective becomes indeed objective.

First in its rebuttal, certainly not unmotivated, of the notion of omnipotent artist, creator of his own masterpiece, father and owner of his creation, Dadaism goes to the heart of this problem, in a way putting on the table that concept which, as a physicist, I refer to as entropy: the rules of hazard (the chance) and of game (the probability), that here go together with space and time, to assert the very negation of art. It is a logical process that excludes the founding value of objects as well as of the experience one can make of them.

Nowadays, in science, this dialectic (that was believed extinct, after the diriment Einsteinian revolution) goes deep into neurosciences; of which “connectomics” - the representation of the brain cortex as a complex network - is by now the undiscussed queen. Here the challenge is to understand the profound link between the concept mind and the object brain; one of the most inextricable realities we may aim to know. Mind is indeed a difficult notion: it is the consciousness of ourselves, all one feels by existing.

Science must account, in a way consistent with the laws of physics of aggregated matter, on one side, how a particular configuration of matter (the brain) can generate processes which systematically take place simultaneously with those mental states which correspond to what one feels when one exists; on the other side, with the principles of complexity science, because “mind” is the emerging phenomenon of the microscopic processes of the brain, how mind is generated. For this reason the Brain is a difficult object to understand, because “all that the brain does is to generate the mind”. Because what makes special the parts of the brain that have to do with the mind is not the substance of which they are made, but their functional and systemic organization. And a state of active consciousness is nothing but the implementation of that special process of “manipulation” of information which is self-consciousness.

Also here, as in the paintings of Max, there is little of “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” in a universe unimaginably complex in its structure. Thus we understand how those paintings are in fact a system of thought but oneiric, which does not reach - or, better, does not assert - a true level of self-consciousness, but induces it in the form of undecipherable combinatorial multiplicity in whom those paintings experiences. For this reason, the word “dream” here means freedom, lightheartedness and yet also introspection and seeping through the unconscious.

Indeed, as it happens for a language, as well in fact as for a complex computation, the work of Pellegrini is essentially a systematic creation of symbols, the output (the “result”), which encodes into itself which significance with respect to a given (but not necessarily univocal) method of interpretation may have the abstract properties implied by other related symbols; the input, which embodies into itself the information contained in the ‘data’ (the world and its perception, life and its ‘magic’, the man and his mind). As the Roman philosopher Secondo Saturnino Salustio wrote, talking about myth, “these things never happened, but always are”: the intelligence sees all of them together in an instant; words travel along them and expose them in succession. Perhaps this is why in Max’s triptych the key characters are Cadmus and Harmony, the Theban bride and groom for whose marriage all the gods of Olympus descended on Earth and who, after their death, were themselves brought to Olympus.