Museo Correr

Museo Correr

MAURIZIO PELLEGRIN. Isole, the third space.

The Third Space

This will hinge upon the location within the gallery of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings owned by the artist. One will be bound up in fabric; and of the other three, one will be complemented by objects, one by a ball of thread and the last by dangling threads. The paintings will be hung in the Antonio da Messina room, the Vivarini, Cima and Lotto room and the Carpaccio room. The Correr project focuses upon the identification of that locus of transition between past and present, life and death, which is symbolised by the threads and fabrics added to the paintings. The function of the additions here recalls that of the Japanese Engawa, a sort of wooden terrace (or, more improperly, a covered veranda or platform) that extends around some of the sides of a Japanese house and serves to divide interior from exterior, public from private, the man-made from the natural. There is a symbiosis between the works of past masters and a contemporary gesture that participates in the history to which they belong; the installation expresses a continuity of spirit and language which lie outside the temporal. In negating the work with a gesture, one affirms it; in negating isolation, one affirms its continuing existence.