REPRESENTATIVE  ARTICLES

A story between the thrill of make-believe and the mysteries of the symbol:

the work of Max Pellegrini

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. The violent, syncopated music that had marked world tastes after the war began to give signs of new needs that could not be summed up only by hearing; it was the dawn of the psychedelic atmospheres, thick mists and deformed mirrors of LSD and Orange Sunshine. The very concept of image, of story, already violently disrupted at the start of the decade by Pop fantasies with coarse advertising and cartoon figuration, was now tainted by an unbridled, brightly coloured, iconographically dazzled vision, frozen on record covers. The panorama plunged from the plastic surface of supermarkets and cartoons into the stroboscopic lights of the first discotheques, into the murky frame of the burgeoning underground culture. This ferment saw city squares all around the world turn into theatres of violence that in some parts also took the form of armed struggle, alongside the dissolute vapours of an increasingly “antagonistic” reality.

Woodstock was a symbol of the decline of a decade that had deeply marked contemporary history and culture, and it was precisely in those months of 1969 that Max Pellegrini dedicated a work to a girl he had just met and who was to become his wife and accompany him for the rest of his life. It is a work still firmly anchored in the styles that Pellegrini had begun to present in the first collective exhibitions in 1965, at the age of 20, and were to be the feature of his first solo exhibition the following year at the Il Punto gallery in Turin.

He was then a young artist immersed in the inquisitiveness of his time, a painter attracted by the stories of everyday events, shrouded in a dense iconography charged with acid colours, played out on the infinite overlaying of image and background, narrative and atmosphere. The figure rises and sinks into a gelatinous surface of ornaments and anthologies, shadows that caress the image dissolving its outlines, merging its features, freeing the joy of a new look. Max Pellegrini’s early works trace the outlines of an entire cultural world that absorbs music, fashion, morals and advertising.

The leading figures in this creative adventure were women; or rather, the beauty, happiness and youth of these girls who were often friends, acquaintances or others newly met. Bodies and faces occupy the scenic space with the lightness and impartiality of someone looking into the eyes of the future, someone who possesses in her smile the amused fascination of an adolescence that realises it is mature. It is a beauty that infects the palette, igniting astonishing and epiphanic colours, tracing indefinable decorations that agitate the background, that suggest a delicate pictorial virtuosity.

They are works that do not fear or shy away from experimental urgency, that confront the new plastic materials, that venture into performative territories, that nod to installation excitements, as in the experience of the Pol Mol space or the adventure at the Piper in 1967.

Max Pellegrini thus traced a grammar that, apart from the photographic connections of the early works, defined certain constants he was never to renounce.

The slow abandoning of the photographic medium that had been so important throughout the 1960s, and that to Pellegrini represented an anchor of reality in the visionary drift of his imagination, effectively coincided with a compelling presence of the symbolic fact. This was not only by confronting an esoteric, magical, secretly initiatory symbology, but also the informed citation in the literary symbol, the formulation of an iconic alphabet cultivated in the greenhouses of philosophical thinking, hinted at in the mysteries of theological images.

The fading of the photographic image, also as simple narrative support, resulted in Pellegrini making a linguistic slide into the atmospheres of an accompanying emotion, into the illusions of the echoes of memory, into the presence of recollections, into the reality of the past. This is how the psychedelic decorations of his early works merged and dissolved into the “Secessionist” symbolism of the landscapes of Egon Schiele, the fabrics of Gustav Klimt and the architecture of Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffman. But there are also the invasive and corrosive upholsteries of Édouard Vuillard, those decorations that absorb the figures, that devour every story to present the protagonism of the scenic space, to glorify a background in which anything can happen. Or again the natural arabesques on which the sign of Aubrey Beardsley ascends, in that subtle Japanese style that exaggerates the sweetness in the faces of women.

Max Pellegrini can thus express his narrative in the discrete mix of a dense and complex symbolism on one hand, and a light, inventive, literary citation on the other. The outcome is a rich, lively, bright and vibrant painting, where the narrative level is composed by resorting to and overlaying numerous stories that merge, appear and disappear on the canvas alternating alarm and expectation. The eye frenetically and inquisitively scans the pictorial space following shreds of histories, fragments of images, plots of stories that are grasped, buried by decorative landscapes that suffocate the delicacy of the figure in their beauty.

Large works to admit the heroism of these figures: their literary burden, their symbolic body, their sumptuous chromatic apparel. It is precisely the colour that reveals the primary role of the language, a painting practice that Max Pellegrini exercises with patient caution, applying the pigment in light glazes, without acceleration, without gestural excesses, leaving the task of luminous reverberation which the figure inhabits to the soft sedimentation of the colour. So here the literary obstruction of a mythological narrative dissolves into the chromatic lighting of sunny yellows, desert ochres, transparent blues of lapislazuli and bright greens of early spring.

The work imposes its centrality with grace and elegance, it murmurs its silent design, it traces the composed guide of its lines perceived beyond the first dazzle of chromatic brilliance. While the imaginary image has the upper hand in the works of another great Piedmontese visionary, Italo Cremona, bending the language to the dazzle of his own story, and while the painting also manages to present its encrusted skin and the gesture cuts the material while adhering to the body of the story, in Max Pellegrini the language remains more educated, smooth, transparent. His painting is above all for the mind, a breath that is captured dilating time, confusing the senses, seeking an elsewhere with the eyes. The more the decorative structure seems to take possession of the scene and the more the vision is rarefied, the more the image drowns in its own beauty and the story takes refuge in the mind.

The superficial immediacy of Max Pellegrini’s works is only the elegant garment of an educated, sophisticated art, aware of its own choices, an art able to wander through the gardens of its own history, to look into the eyes of the symbol’s mystery, which accompanies the figure into the depths of literature and philosophy.

Moving away from the din of the present has perhaps denied the artist that often desired recognition and visibility, but at the same time it has allowed his work to tale less well-known roads, to capture submerged voices, to produce rare painting.