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. What flight, to what country, could ensure its salvation? What refuge, what Egypt of the colours of fire and night can offer escape from the homicidal fury of the iconoclasts of the present? But if we can perceive this threat, we also possess the strength (or the grace?) to imagine that art can still be like childhood, or that it has never ceased existing in childhood, it has never aged, it has always looked at the world with the same gaze, the gaze of the Innocents, provoking the hatred of Herod and his gesture of slaughter.In Max Pellegrini there is this childlike quality, this virtue of innocence, just as there is also this sense of menace, of impending danger, of urgent flight. Nevertheless there is nothing dramatic in this work; it is already distanced, so to speak, safely sheltered. Like its subject matter, it seems to be without anguish or alarm, at least on the surface. Instead, it takes on the appearance of an idyll, a long pastoral narrative, full of flutes and shepherds, far from the sands and the thirst. We are closer to Titian and the feasts of the Renaissance than to the biblical tales of slaying and destruction. This Flight into Egypt is a stroll through the Garden of Eden, with the almost Franciscan celebration of the fruit, the flowers, the plants, the animals, as if there were nothing to fear, to fight, everything offered far the taking. Just as is said of the Innocents, of those who are threatened with slaughter, and have “their hands full”. I have not encountered, in fact, a gaze more pure, closer to childhood, more innocent, or perhaps more naive - in the positive sense of the term than that of Max Pellegrini.

From this natural retreat or detachment he seems to have derived a pure, simple power - without even considering the problem of its validity - to call forth springs of fresh water, to cause trees to bloom. But this painting does not come from the void; it receives nothing spontaneously. The art scene in the 1960s, when Pellegrini began his career, was truly a desert: on one side there was abstract painting - “action painting”, “tachiste”, “geometrie”, “lyrical”. On the other there was the strident, noisy figurative art derived from American advertising. All this was far away from life. More than distant: it was the arrogant result of the inherent aggressivity of the technological, mercantile World, which was beginning to triumph at the time, and which is still our world.

It was difficult to find a way to combat the spiritual aridity and physical violence that was taking hold. The close, nearly fraternal example of Casorati was probably decisive. This bas been said, and correctly. The hermit of Via Mazzini had known how (and he was perhaps unique in this sense) to create a universe of calm and sensuality, from which Pellegrini has borrowed, in the same placement, more than one element. Casorati was magnificently endowed with the gift of being childlike, an understanding of the world of the child, an intuition - almost a form of immediate empathy - of the universe of the infant, with its games, anxieties, torments and joys. Pellegrini, in turn, knows about the miracle of this interior awareness, and expresses it in his world, perhaps because he has never abandoned the world of childhood, continuing to live there in a natural way.

Another common element is that of sensuality, women, the feminine universe. This is not merely a universe of sexual attraction, but one of the female per se, from the little girl to the elderly lady, from the virgin to the mother: it is the secret world of fabrics, of whispering silk, of laughter, disguises, flounces, hats, rouge, and it is also the world of the “green paradises” of Baudelaire.

And all this is said, expressed, painted in those grand wrappings, those volutes, those ample, gentle curves that encircle the bodies and that also, in this case, display their affinity with the admirable style, severe and sensual, tense and carnal, created by Casorati, based on the teachings of the painting of Giotto and the Ferraresi. But there is more. Being French, I am reminded of another example, besides that of the Turinese master, which can shed light on the singular work of Pellegrini.

In the subjects, the personages, but also in the style, in the apparently (but only apparently) “decorative” look of the work, and in the wrappings, the curves, the deceptive gentleness, the muted palette occasionally violently shaken by a stroke of brilliance, this singular work displays - and perhaps the artist is also aware? - unsettling similarities to that of a Frenchman who was a contemporary of Casorati: Maurice Denis. Like Casorati, Denis focused on the future, precisely as he recovered connections to tradition. A radical theorist of pure painting, which he summed up in his all too famous and oft-quoted formula1, acknowledged master of the Nabis, exponent, in the 1920s, of a painting of sensibility and spirituality, of rigor and sensuality. In his observation of an extreme naturalism, closer to Maillol than to Matisse, Denis is nevertheless capable, in his mature work, of reviving the great scenes and personages of the Bible with the force and vivacity they had lost; in the end, he produced paintings capable of releasing “the joy of the senses and of the inner life - Heaven and Arcadia”, as he himself said.

An icon, this had become his ideal: not a naturalistic image, not an idea given a perceptible form, as in the notions of the Symbolists, not the drying up of the wealth squandered by the senses and a rarefaction of the sense of profusion of the world, like that of the Abstract painters, but something that descends from the sacred, in keeping with a tradition that dates back to the Nicene Council and its decisions regarding the meaning and value of the “image”, the real incarnation of the Holy Word.

The ideas of Maurice Denis have, for many years, been a source of wry amusement, while his painting has been overlooked. Today both his ideas and his painting are being rediscovered. Max Pellegrini, in his secret garden - the garden of the child and the artist - is no longer so alone as he reflects on the destiny of the painting that came after Caravaggio, and as he paints his periplus beyond the desert, toward the flowery meadows of the image made flesh and the bodies made Word: the time has come to take a new look at his paintings...

(In Max Pellegrini: opere 1966-1996, exhibition catalogue [Palazzo Sarcinelli, Galleria comunale d’arte, Conegliano, 4 May - 9 June 1996], Electa, Milan 1996. Translation by Steve Piccolo)

1 “To remember that a painting - more than a battlehorse, a nude woman, or any sort of anecdote - is, essentially, a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order”.