NICOLA 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 the perfect target for this restless and untamed creature called art history. The result of a precocious mind, exposed to the sun of post-war Italy, imbued in the vibrant cultural scene of Turin and nurtured by unconditional love for the visual, the artworks of Max Pellegrini are first of all images.

From when the artist exhibited his work for the first time in 1966, the world was different. We were still living in an analog world, a world without personal computers, a world without Internet and a world without images. At the same time artists like Max Pellegrini1 became prophets of a new reality in which the vocabulary that is related to the visual would evolve according to or even anticipating the current state of technology and society.

Since the first daguerreotype image was produced in 1837 until the 1970s, we would use the word “photograph” to refer to something that represents a work of art. This fraction of time was characterized by the primal role of mass-media and dialogical systems and it was based on the notion of ideology. In the 1980s the word “picture” emerged and informed us about a new reality in which the photographic representation of something becomes the thing itself, which means that it can be manipulated and appropriated, moved into a different context-its meaning being subverted and extrapolated.

Following this revolution is the current state of a reality in which we don’t even question the nature and situation where a picture has been presented. We don’t have to ask ourselves “what is this picture?” because in the digital world, images - the new word - are conceived so they can immediately be moved, again restlessly, in order to be transformed, distributed and consumed before being used again and again and again.

Although many people tend to confound these two words it is important to underline the differences between the word “picture” and the word “image” and their related etymology will explain why the latter perfectly suits the prophetic work of Max Pellegrini. While “picture” comes from the Latin pictu¯ra which means the act of painting, “image” comes from the Latin ima¯gin, stem of ima¯go¯, which means a copy of something else. In other words an image is just a gate to another layer of reality.

Aware of this terminology we understand the world of images as the world of Max Pellegrini, who is the image-maker ante litteram, the quintessential digital demiurge. As paradoxical as it might seem, the element that reveals his understanding of the notion of images is the technique he employed in order to create his early paintings, which mostly depicted female figures.

Figurative, although we wonder whether the figuration-abstraction dichotomy still makes sense, his works of art are rendered with a unique technique, a pastiche of photography, photo-appropriation, and painting applied through brushstrokes as well as brought 0nto the canvas with the use of stencils. If we look carefully at images of his work we realize that they look as if they would have to explain how Adobe Photoshop works. A pixel-based image editor conceived through layers and equipped with different kinds of rendering mimicking different canonical painting modes, Adobe Photoshop is computer software that is used to edit a digital file, an image. Image-neither photograph, nor picture - is also one of the items on its menu.

Once we understand the paintings of Max Pellegrini as Adobe Photoshop files that were manually created two decades before a PhD student at the University of Michigan named Thomas Knoll began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display, then we realize that these works of art are not just a contribution to the history of art, or to the history of painting, they are in fact the premonition of a new way of thinking.

Art making has always mirrored and sometimes even anticipated reality at large. The invention of perspective in the early Renaissance went hand-in-hand with the progressive humanism that dominated all the philosophical theories of that time, while the collapse of the gold standard in the 1970s coincided with the rise of Conceptual Art. Recently the new form of labor, the so-called experience economy and the creation of new terms such as “prosumer”8 - a mix between producer and consumer which summarizes the current interchanging state of these two positions-became a clear counterpart to the emergence of visual art that is ever more participatory and relational.

If we look at the art of Max Pellegrini through this scope and we try to analyze his body of work in relation to the reality that was contemporary to its making it is clear how he wanted to push the rules of painting in a direction that transforms the work into an image as if he knew the kind of future we were going to experience. Furthermore the artist’s affiliation with Fluxus comes as no surprise. Speaking of how art can precede movements in technology and society, Fluxus is maybe the best example of a gathering or group of individuals that refused all the assumption dictated by the field of visual art in order to create new ways of conceiving, creating, communicating and distributing visual content.

Completely anti-market, deeply international and a truth movement-the name is taken from the Latin word meaning flow, flux-Fluxus was a network before the idea of network, and its most successful materialization- the Internet-was even conceived. If we look at its structure, which is not a post-structure but rather a hyper-structure, we see the seeds of what the philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have tried to define in their trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2005) and Commonwealth (2011):

New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjecture of events, in the universal nomadism. [...] They are not posed merely against the imperial system-they are not simply negative forces. They also express, nourish, and develop positively their own constituent projects. [...] This constituent aspect of the movement of the multitude, in its myriad faces, is really the positive terrain of the historical construction of Empire, [...] an antagonistic and creative positivity. The deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction.

Careful reading of this passage not only underlines how Fluxus was anticipatory but even more it highlights the current state of reality in which images are the very fiber of this colourful and iridescent reality.

Iridescent, or cangiante-one of the four canonical painting modes of the Renaissance together with Unione, Chiaroscuro, and Sfumato, whose meaning derives from the Italian cangiare “to change” - is a very important word for understanding what is contemporary and a very good word to be used when looking at the late production of Max Pellegrini. Here the dynamism of the early works and their unique mix of different techniques has been substituted by a more static and polished version, which recalls how Macintosh is continuously updating the style of the iPhone without really betraying its original nature. Furthermore these works are even more psychedelic than the early series, their pastoral tone and Photoshop- like composition reassure us that the creative flame of Max Pellegrini is stronger than ever.

A great admirer of the Nabis group and especially of Paul Sérusier’s masterpiece “The Talisman” I wonder if Max Pellegrini is now once again anticipating the future, advocating the escape from the metropolis which has been the centre of a society that is based on immaterial capital, phantom capital and information. Asking myself this question in New York, the metropolis of all metropolises, I wonder if we should leave the city and move to a contemporary version of Pont-Aven, the town in Brittany where the Nabis went to escape Paris, and deliver our creative labor through this condition of displacement. Looking at the work of Max Pellegrini, I am tempted as never before.