How being partially deaf has influenced the visual imagination of the Turin born Artist who plays with both holy and secular.

Five Years ago, simultaneously with an exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, an important monograph on the art work of Max Pellegrini was published, where all the various periods of his painting were analyzed, from the pop art period of the 60s to the psychedelic conceptual one, from the d’apres period of the great masters to his current work, allegorical and visionary, filled with mythological and religious references. 

A path which is characterized by a consistent imaginative force, but also by the development of a figurative language, which begins with a graphic and chromatic elaboration of photographic materials and then progressively since the 80s marries compositions, logics and techniques that are definitely and specifically tied to painting.

With the same publisher, Umberto Allemandi, a new monograph has now been published which focuses on the most relevant aspects of the Artist’s recent complex and poetic narrative, both from a thematic and stylist standpoint. The occasion for this latest publication (with essays by Laura Mattioli and Mario Rasetti) was an exhibition at the OGR of Turin of eight great paintings, titled The Veil and the Fortress, which explores the metaphors of silence.

“Silence can be as fragile as ice or as an impenetrable as a stone, it can fall like a curtain or be raised like a bank,” writes in his introduction to the show Nicola Ricciardi, artistic director of the OGR, who wanted this exhibition as part of a performance and exhibition program that has analyzed music as an art object and now explores silence as the engine of creativity.

And it is precisely in this sense that the art work of Max Pellegrini represents an exemplary case, because the Artist with courage and intelligence has accepted in this show to confront explicitly a crucial question that is at the foundation of his creativity: the influenc

e that being partially deaf (since childhood as a result of several hear infections) has had on his perception, stimulation and development of his visual imagination, with particular reference to his sensibility and creative expression.

With great clarity the Artist declares “Being partially deaf means that the construction of reality is objectively a little different for me, at times deformed, and completed by my own imagination, which gives a logical and conceptual sense to the real imagines that influence my inventiveness.”

The center force generating his painting is a prolific piling, stratification and selection of visual experiences, and most importantly of a variety of images which are derived from a great variety of cultural and artistic iconographies, which then are transformed into vast painted stories, with plots that are always open and subject to multiple interpretations. The compositions are well conceived but always in flux and enigmatic, filled with symbols and literary references; that evoke mythological, mystical and spiritual images which are both dreamlike and surreal.

What characterizes in an unconventional way his paintings are also the titles (an integral part of the work of art itself) that are very long, sometimes extremely long, and always quite obscure.

As an example, the titles of two of the works in display are “Immersion in the snake’s water with iron corset as prison of its coils in the endless estuary that leads to Venice” and “The twelve Apostles dressed as shamans watch over the sleep of the Messiah while a boundless flock approaches the little flames of hope.”

In the first painting we see a naked girl, who is half way into the water next to a huge snake, and with greater attention we notice on the water’s surface fantastical reflections of Venice. But in the second, a monumental diptych, the scene becomes even more cryptic, because we are facing twelve totally primitive figures, and only a long table which is set could hint to the Last Supper, while the sheep like in a puzzle are trapped into some internal lines within a brown surface; the small lights may perhaps have to do with some gloom figures painted below.

Here words and images interact very tightly creating what we may call a verbal-visual dimension, where a “deafening silence” seems to echo and reverberate in a flabbergasting and charming iconic explosion.

Pellegrini, who defines himself as a “conceptual artist who paints” (but rather sui generis), tries in utopian fashion to capture the profound meaning and values of transcendence, well aware of the inevitable defeat and constant risk of precipitating into the silent emptiness of nonsense.