MIRELLA BANDINI

Among the various currents and trends within which contemporary art is sought to be channelled, there are also independent people whose work is generally pursued far from the usual circuits.

The Turin artist Max Pellegrini belongs to this sector and is exhibiting a series of large paintings entitled “The Flight into Egypt and other post-Caravaggio themes” at the Philippe Daverio gallery (until 15 September), with catalogue essays by Guido Ceronetti and Gianni Vattimo. This is a visionary and dream-like but above all theatrical figuration, offered through expert photographic crops. Each one of his paintings is actually a “performance”, an assembly of figures who perform the comedy of art, and who in the performing fiction look at us the observers in an erudite and ancient plot.

Pellegrini uses large sizes for his paintings, which in turn are presented to us as a reification of the proscenium, a stage on which figures act in always frontal poses, whose mobility is entrusted to gesture and hands, while the face, generally immobile or masked, is closed in its inwardness. Produced with the expert and refined technique of oil painting, the pictures reveal classical reminiscences, particularly eighteenth- century painting, and the youthful work of Caravaggio. The latter is a much loved artist because “there is a connection in his realism between the Dionysian, which conceives art as adhesion to the most popular manifestations, and the Apollonian, which conceives art as pure ideal”. Pellegrini’s metaphysical and hermetic realism draws its origins from his time spent in the territory of Pop art during his youth, between 1965 and 1967, where he made his first paintings. From this sphere he retains the photographic medium, from which he draws models for his figuration and certain chromatic dissonances, and especially the object evidence of some everyday images. The tribute-works in the exhibition to two famous photographers, Brassaï and Man Ray, are particularly interesting; their themes are the cue for a reinterpretation in dreamlike and scenographic terms.

Ceronetti focuses excellently on the problem regarding the dream-like aspect that runs through all of Pellegrini’s works: “You say that you never dream, sleeping, and this explains the reckless accumulation of artificial dreams in your rush between images, the incessant abduction that you make of dreams dreamt by others and translated into famous figures, places seen and never seen, transient and everyday things, mixing and remixing all in the special and enigmatic discord of dreams”. While Vattimo, in the other essay-letter in the catalogue, rereading Heidegger and Gadamer on the nature of appearance in art, specifies that his painting, “despite all its tangible evidence and imaginative charm, is not painting of full presence, in my opinion, but rather of the evocation-summons, and so it calls on an experience of truth as a breaking through rather than a complete and perfect form”. And in the meantime Pellegrini’s magic and fascinating Baroque theatre continues to look at us, with the dazzle of fiction, with the classical references of the performance, whose key we grasp at to penetrate it, but pointlessly, in that it is appearance and reflecting mirror in the world.

(In “La Stampa - Tuttolibri”, No. 756, 1991)