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 a past that the flow of history has overtaken, does not express the impotence of living in the present and the need, typical of the weak and insecure, to find refuge in the bosom of already ended experiences, that have thus already given a response to man’s questions, gathering fruit of a past season that are withered and thus seem much sweeter and more appealing. Starting from another point of view, and from a critical commitment aimed at understanding the motivations behind certain showy phenomena of the art of our time, another scholar, Renato Barilli, writing for the exhibition “The Different Repetition” at the Marconi Studio in Milan, noted the evidence of certain disconcerting ferments in the sphere of an artistic society that in many ways flaunts a desire to detach from tradition and to favour the study of the new and the authentic, obeying the emerging principle of inventive originality. Barilli has highlighted the fact that current artistic culture, apparently “neophiliac”, permeated with an almost futuristic expectation of the new, has actually given rise to the greatest ‘memorisation of the past’ that has ever taken place. Barilla thinks this is because the innovative formal, pictorial and iconic resources allowed by art have thinned out with time, or rather seem now to be worn out, exhausted. In a period when the instruments of art have no confines of legitimacy, he says that man finds himself with an impoverished imagination, in the same way that, in a period when technological achievements promise the surpassing of every limit in the near future, the earth has reached the point of breakage regarding the essential goods: air, water and food. Barilli’s thesis is interesting but presumes that man’s imaginative faculties are a tank emptied by use over time, while in reality use and time cannot do other than renew it, if not increase its capacity, since every new figure produced by art becomes a new reality that stimulates the imagination. To Barilla it is as if humanity finds itself in an “end of road” situation and the only alternative that remains is to turn the eyes back towards the past, to give it a definitive goodbye and take a leap into the unknown, or to adopt it in its entirety and push it towards the present, retracing with a different spirit and in the opposite direction the itinerary from yesterday to today. The problem posed by the desire to sentimentally revive the forms of the past, or to recover them to make an iconic and cultural verification, remains open. Max Pellegrini’s painting, however, suggests a third hypothesis based on the operative elements of the artistic action. It is evident that he too looks to the past, it could rather be said that he deliberately looks to the most well-used models; those that have become genuine “commonplaces” of media culture: Franz Hals, the Carracci, Velasquez, Pontormo, Bronzino, Piazzetta, Van Dyck, Rubens and more latterly Renoir, Fattori, Lega, Segantini and others, though all able to be placed in the circle of a profound sense of reality, of a lively sensuality, of a positive ability to render the natural elements in terms of beauty and formal delicacy; and of nature interpreted as a perennial place of tender meetings. Looking at the past is to Max Pellegrini a knowing choice, which concerns the reasons and methods of practising art intended as the foundation of every further development. The problematic aspects of the artist’s action today are present in the intelligence of this young artist. I recall the exhibition of many years ago at the Castello del Valentino, in the context of the Faculty of Architecture. A companion of Nespolo at the time, Pellegrini had already guessed the possibilities offered, in the sense of mass media communication, by use of the photographic image placed on the canvas and the language of cartoons. These media and their structures magnified his extraordinary talents as a draughtsman and graphic artist, his ability to establish a balance in tension though dealing with heterogeneous elements. If the pleasure of the amusement in itself, and the slowly savoured game, and the production in series as ironic production variant, which Nespolo then took forward in perfect consistency with a view of the things of this world, considered more in their vices than the virtues, which is cynical and so in a certain extent permissive; if that pleasure, I was saying, has abandoned the spirit of Pellegrini it is because everything in him, culture, sensitivity and background, direct him towards a strict, rigorous research, equally committed both technically and morally. The use of the photographic fragment and the structure of the cartoon were already clear indications of a study of expressive values suited to immediate communication, tied to a presence or an authentic event. In the centre of these values Pellegrini places the human figure, the expression of the human figure, which he recognises as an authentic medium of every reality. Looking at the models offered by the artists of the past is like peering into their work, and understanding their direction between thought and image, idea and figure. Giacometti also peered at the past, with this same spirit: understanding the past so as to better comprehend the present, deciphering the drawing of the lines of the past to recognise the drawing of one’s own lines in the present. In short, getting to work, and allowing the suggestions of the masters to conduct. So the past is no longer the place of answers already given and experiences already over, but the place of models that historical and sentimental distance place in the right light; a term of reference that has already undergone all the possible modifications and variations, already filtered, already decanted. The models offered to Max Pellegrini by his own historic time, the last dozen years, show the beginning of an internal pollution at their own origins, and this is why Pellegrini rejects them. The surrealist model actually flakes away, unravels, without restraint in the ambiguous world of the unconscious. Bacon’s model, to which many young artists of his generation rapidly ran for refuge, is based on the overturning of a contorted and violent, even if genuine, passion, a degradation, a genuine physical and psychic consummation. The hyper-realistic models in their extreme obstinacy seem to risk no more than a meticulous hibernation of the real objective, which they also seem to venerate. Whereas he wants to discover the secret by which the image, as loyal echo of nature and as invention of the imagination, can reconcile in a single figure the forms of truth and those of beauty.

(In Max Pellegrini, exhibition catalogue, Documenta - Arte Varia, Turin 1975)