Gianni Pellegrini Exhibits Surface and Sign in Garda Art Program
The “orientations” of Gianni Pellegrini conclude the annual program of “Strategies for Art,” the “Diachronic-Star Events” exhibitions that involved various locations on Lake Garda this summer. The aim was to connect the Gardesano area with protagonists of contemporary art, inspiring a group of local enthusiasts to establish a committee with the purpose of promoting and spreading greater awareness of the debate on contemporary art, which often passes over people’s heads. The “Strategies for Art” program engaged several Garda centers, which provided spaces and sponsors to support the events, primarily financed by private individuals, following an ideal itinerary linking the shores: from Riva del Garda to Nago-Torbole, Malcesine, and Gardone Riviera.
Objectives and Exhibition Path
The organizers intend to continue as a hub for gathering and a catalyst towards similarly interested entities in the debate on contemporary art in future years. In this way, the exhibition route at Palazzo Martini showcased works by Cioffi, Strada, Galli, Vago, Morandi, Bernardoni, Valentini, Pellegrini, while the various rooms displayed seventeenth-century wall decorations recovered through meticulous restoration work.
Other exhibitions included Ghinzani’s work at Forte di Nago and Vago’s at Malcesine Castle. Gianni Pellegrini’s exhibition, at the Vittoriale in Gardone Riviera until November 1st, concludes and crowns the first outing of the artistic events program managed by Cavenaghi Arte of Milan, with Palazzo Martini serving as the main hub.
Analysis of Gianni Pellegrini’s Works
At the Vittoriale, for the artist from Riva, a mature artistic journey reaches a new stage that has been underway for years, with studies on surface and signs, scratches, and the exploration of pictorial space understood in an absolute sense — without landscape, figuration, or anything that might disturb pure contemplation. As we mentioned a few years ago, Gianni Pellegrini has deepened the profound and inseparable connection between gesture and surface, paying attention to rhythm and internal movement within the absolute limits of the canvas.
Thus, in the “scratches,” it was evident that the artist sought to draw the most intimate effects from the marks on the surface, from sign to sign, scratching the surface and causing it to pulse in some way: an operation that emphasizes a painting not as figuration but as silence and pause, in contrast to the universe of the “homo faber.”
The idea of minimalist painting has recently given rise, as documented at the Vittoriale, to a new phase, linked to the same vibration of the surface but at the same time aimed at conquering the shadow-light relationship. Critic Claudio Cerritelli wrote that Gianni Pellegrini “has reached a point in his pictorial investigation from which it is hard to retreat; in fact, more than reaching it, he has found himself involved in it, in an attempt to capture the inner upheavals of the sign…” A milestone at the Vittoriale, this is thus a starting point for further pictorial investigations.
