MARIA TERESA ROBERTO
MARIA TERESA ROBERTO
Max Pellegrini’s debut was early (in 1966, at the age of 21), but clearly defined in terms of expressive intentions. On a formal level there was the meeting of photography and painting, all that time decisive for artists working in Europe and the US; the subjects, the atmospheres and the choice of images could now be placed between Blow-Up and Sgt. Pepper’s, 1966 (year of Pellegrini’s first solo exhibition at the Punto gallery) and 1967 (his second appearance in Turin at the Piper Club). Looking back at those early works now it is all the flagrancy of the 1960s that greets us, strikes us and excites us with the power of a joyous and only recently liberated sensuality, with the memory of a pervasive musicality and a floral fashion, with the lightness of a coloured everyday transformed by psychedelic tones.
In the 1966 paintings the subjects are urban landscapes, building sites, cars and the contemporary city in its various facets. Fields and lines of colour act to make chromatic scores overlap photographs transferred onto canvas, condensing attention and intensity on some points, cancelling or concealing others. As in Antonioni’s film, the photographic shot is enlarged, observed close up and its possible uncertainties and ambiguities analysed.
In those of 1967 the painting act is lightened in terms of material and colour, and the female figure becomes the protagonist. In this series the artist proceeds by subsequent layers, superimposing open meshes of decorative elements in acid and fluorescent ranges over the photographic images. The smiling faces in this gallery of young women look at the world with “kaleidoscope eyes” and their bodies are drawn with the shadows projected by “tangerine trees” and “marmalade skies”, as described by John Lennon in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a cult track from the Beatles’ 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Pellegrini’s closeness to music is also the basis of another group of works from this same period. Here the canvas is replaced by sheets of transparent plastic on which pictures of singers and musicians are imprinted and combined, as they were depicted in the graphics of record covers. But examining the beginnings of Max Pellegrini’s career also offers significant cues for more precisely outlining the artistic geography of Turin in the period immediately before the appearance of Arte Povera, a more articulate and extensive geography than that which appeared in many subsequent reconstructions. (Bringing some of those links to the centre of attention is moreover the aim of “Surprise”, a series of monographic exhibitions launched by the GAM of Turin in 2012, which in recent months has dedicated a study to the first period of Pellegrini’s painting).
It was a context rich in different positions, whose first inventory is documented in the now almost forgotten exhibition, “La lettura del linguaggio visivo” (Reading the visual language), held at the Castello del Valentino by the Turin Polytechnic Architecture Department’s School of Sciences and Graphic Arts. Apart from Pellegrini, who was later to make his contribution to that same Department for many years as a researcher and teacher, the exhibition also featured Piero Gilardi, Aldo Mondino, Ugo Nespolo and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others. The organisers’ aim was to put the methods of a gestalt reading of forms to the test, on the living body of works by a new generation of artists. Now, almost five decades later, it is possible to identify a line of research that developed and surpassed Pop themes analytically, ironically or in reportage.
An important reference for many of these artists was the Punto gallery, which was directed by Gian Enzo Sperone between 1963 and 1964 before he opened his own space in Piazza Carlo Alberto. The Punto hosted solo exhibitions of Nespolo and of Pellegrini, and was involved in organising the first Fluxus event in Turin in 1967.
In April of that year “Les mots et les choses. Concert Fluxus art total” was launched by Ben Vautier and Ugo Nespolo, with the presence of Plinio Martelli, Max Pellegrini, Gianni-Emilio Simonetti and many others, in conjunction with the opening of the “Museo Sperimentale d’Arte Contemporanea” (Experimental Museum of Contemporary Art) at the GAM - a collection in progress of 1960s Italian art. The event comprised three days of actions and gestural music concerts that, going through the streets of the city, connected the Punto, the Gobetti theatre and, unexpectedly, the GAM. That brief moment of the fluid circulation of words and images between literature, cinema, theatre, music and visual arts found its Turin temple in the Piper Club. An example of radical architecture designed by the architect Piero Derossi with the Strum group, the Piper now functioned not only as a discotheque but also as a theathre and exhibition venue, and between 1966 and 1968 hosted solo exhibitions of Pellegrini and Pistoletto, Mario Schifano’s music group, Boetti, Sauzeau, Gilardi and Colombotto Rosso’s Beat Fashion Parade and a preview of Mysteries by the Living Theatre. But after having recalled that period of attitudes and behaviours, of approaches to art and life - of which Pellegrini’s initial works are a significant sign - it is time to go back to painting.
In 1966 Paolo Fossati had reviewed the solo exhibition at the Punto: “A series of works in which there is a precarious and intelligent balance between ambiguously composed photography and painting. The ambiguity is studied and intended. Where the pictorial sensitivity snags in the photographic weft, the sumptuous and arabesque line of certain floral styles, certainly Art Nouveau, appears” (“L’Unità”, Turin, 11 May 1966. See p. 67 in this catalogue).
Fossati had already managed to grasp an additional component in those paintings directly facing the present: the implicit reflection “on the ambiguous nature of the culture that informs our visual processes”. In subsequent years it was to be Luigi Carluccio who accompanied the artist in going back to start again
from the painting of the past. In his presentation to Pellegrini’s exhibition at the Documenta gallery in 1975, the critic noted that “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” (see p. 79 in this catalogue).
After curating “Combattimento per un’immagine” (Fighting for an Image) at the GAM in 1973, with Daniela Palazzoli, the first museum exhibition in which the subject of the relation between painting and photography was considered in historical terms, but with a glimpse reaching through to Conceptual Art, Carluccio went back to concentrating his attention on the horizons of contemporary painting, on the reminders of the past that began to resound in it in different forms of revival, revisitations, d’après, and which would clearly emerge only at the end of the decade, not only in Italy but at an international level. “Arte come arte: la persistenza dell’opera” (Art as art: the persistence of the work) was the title Carluccio had wanted to give the Venice Biennale of 1982, before his sudden death. “Aperto” (Open) the section of the Biennale dedicated to the latest trends, was curated by Tommaso Trini that year, and Pellegrini was invited to take part in that event directed towards the many then emerging forms of the rediscovery of painting.
The citations and anachronisms that typify the phenomenon of the return to painting were read in that historical moment as a reaction to a decade of dematerialised, diffuse, experimental artistic practices, but it is now possible to better understand the meaning of that change of direction. As Georges Didi-Huberman constantly points out in his interpretation of Aby Warburg’s work, images are polychronic objects, in which different meanings and chronologies are layered and remain active. But Carluccio had already noted this in different words in 1975, identifying as the impetus of Pellegrini’s painting the desire 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”.