The Figures Stare into the Vacuum of Their Silence
LAURA MATTIOLI
In 1797 Francisco Goya produced the famous etched and aquatinted image titled “The dream of reason generates monsters” (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos), which he was to publish two years later as number forty-three of his series of engravings “The Caprices” (Los caprichos). There are three manuscripts of the period referring to this work. The first, written by Goya and held in the Prado Museum, contains the words: “Fantasy without reason generates impossible monsters: united to reason it is mother of the arts and origin of wonders” (La fantasía abandonada de la razon produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella es madre de las artes y origen de las maravillas).
NICOLA RICCIARDI
The Officine Grandi Riparazioni of Turin hosted an incessant succession of sounds from 1895: the ring of hammers, the gliding of gantry cranes, the hum of workers engaged in maintaining railway vehicles. Then, a century later, when the last train left the historic works in Corso Castelfidardo, the sound of work gave way to the quiet of abandon. A dozen or so years then had to pass before sound returned to inhabit the workshops: it was 30 September 2017 and the reborn OGR once again opened their doors to receive a since then uninterrupted flow of sounds, no longer made by industrial machinery but by the voice and instruments of an ensemble of heterogeneous artists who helped turn the old factory into a cultural institution, by way of exhibitions, concerts and performances.
How being partially deaf has influenced the visual imagination of the Turin born Artist who plays with both holy and secular.
50 Years of Max Pellegrini's Painted
KAREN KEDMEY
With its retrospective showing of 50 years of painting by the individualistic Italian painter Max Pellegrini, Heather James Fine Art celebrates its recent representation of the artist and introduces audiences to the range of his work. His large-scale compositions fill the gallery’s Palm Desert location, immersing visitors in his dreamlike visions.
CAROL CHEH
As an artist, Max Pellegrini has always been an exuberant explorer. His youthful prints, paintings, and mixed-media works of the 1960s reflected the styles that were influential at the time—Pop Art, psychedelia, rock’n’roll posters, and the films of avant-garde director Federico Fellini.
DANILO ECCHER
In the second half of the 1960s, youth culture was beginning to sprinkle the rebellious desires that had been shaken up from the start of the decade with new streaks of interests and prospects. The feminist drive took root in an awareness of the body that partly and, especially, occurred due to the breaking of sexual conventions, in this case with a rediscovery of Wilhelm Reich’s writings.
JEAN CLAIR
The Gospel of Matthew, which includes the episode of the Flight into Egypt, is often called the “Gospel of Childhood”. This is a moving definition, because it implies that a secret place unites, in time’s order, the beginning of human life, when it is still enclosed in the indeterminacy of its initial moments, and a place, a landscape which is also primary and which, in the order of space, is simultaneously refuge and perdition, salvation and slavery. Egypt, simultaneously death and life. Its ancient inhabitants called it the Black and the Red; the Red of the Sahara, the Black of the Nile, the sterile desert and the fertile valley. A single matrix - solitude or garden of contrasting colours - that simultaneously causes death and rescues life. It is there that I see the destiny of the painting of this century’s end.
The Flight into Egypt and other post-Caravaggio themes
PHILIPPE DAVERIO
Max Pellegrini is an esoteric, Turinese artist. His mysteries are far-off and aphonic, his painting provocative and clever.
The cycle of works illustrated by this catalogue is the arrival point of a pathway begun almost 30 yearsago when Pop Art, partly discovered and partly imposed on him as on many young artists, had givena healthy shock, freeing them from the formalism and informalism of the academies.
MARIA TERESA ROBERTO
Max Pellegrini’s debut was early (in 1966, at the age of 21), but clearly defined in terms of expressive intentions. On a formal level there was the meeting of photography and painting, all that time decisive for artists working in Europe and the US; the subjects, the atmospheres and the choice of images could now be placed between Blow-Up and Sgt. Pepper’s, 1966 (year of Pellegrini’s first solo exhibition at the Punto gallery) and 1967 (his second appearance in Turin at the Piper Club). Looking back at those early works now it is all the flagrancy of the 1960s that greets us, strikes us and excites us with the power of a joyous and only recently liberated sensuality, with the memory of a pervasive musicality and a floral fashion, with the lightness of a coloured everyday transformed by psychedelic tones.
PAOLO FOSSATI
A very young Massimo Pellegrini (the average age of first exhibitions is now resoundingly dropping) makes his debut at “Punto” with a series of works in which there is a precarious and intelligent balance between ambiguously composed photography and painting. The ambiguity is studied and intended. Where the pictorial sensitivity snags in the photographic weft, the sumptuous and arabesque line of certain floral styles, certainly Art Nouveau, appears.
LUIGI CARLUCCIO
We are living through a time when rejection of tradition and the past is closely accompanied by returns and recoveries of culture. Epochs and aspects of art me back to life in revivals, and the phenomenon has been the object of various interpretations. In the introductory pages to a recent anthology of essays examining the recoveries made in recent years by taste and the critics, Argan asks if that which nourishes so many journeys back in time, towards..
PAOLO LEVI, GUIDO CERONETTI, MAX PELLEGRINI, GIANNI VATTIMO
At a time when we are enfolded by, or better, allow ourselves to be drawn in by pictorial themes played out on the transient, Max Pellegrini seems more certain than ever of staying in the sphere of his own culture; almost as if wagering on its morality. It is a direction that brings with it a hint of the solitary adventure, because when the point of reference is history, or rather the daily news, the danger likes in the weariness of having to constantly forego the..
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.
Imagine. The work of Max Pellegrini
NIICOLA TREZZI
Time and especially history are strange animals. A ferocious and untamed hunter history wanders restlessly in order to find things that are unexpected and unpredictable. When history meets art - the wildest of all creatures - the result can be dangerous and it should be. The work of Max Pellegrini is..
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.
The Silence that Produces Monsters
ELVIRA MORETTI
Absolute silence does not exist. Everywhere we have life forms, there will always be a kind of sound produced by the human body, whether it is our heartbeat, our blood flowing or the air going in and out of our lungs.
It is not possible to find absolute silence even in an anechoic chamber, a room built with a specific absorbent material to completely cancel out the noise from outside and reflections from the walls of the sounds produced inside.