Leonardo Pellegrini
Casa de Salta. Buenos Aires
An architect and urban planner, Leonardo Pellegrini (Argentina, 1969) lives and works in Salta “the beautiful”, as announced in the advertisement that promotes this province, in whose premises in Buenos Aires city the solo show MB # is being held. But far from any figurative or descriptive intention associated to the portentous natural beauties of his place in the world, the artist’s works reveal charming and vague images. They are abstract paintings that exude movement and speed, and that even invite the viewer to reflect about issues of perception
Initially, Pellegrini utilizes digital photography as a tool, and then he resorts to a computer to process these pictures using a filter that blurs the images and renders them diffuse, unrecognizable, with the obvious intention of disputing the supremacy of technology and debating the notion of photography as document. Thus, although he has his point of departure in images of urban perspectives and industrial premises, what he eventually transfers onto the canvas are abstract settings in which one may glimpse the hand of the painter and the reflections of the street lights, nocturnal silhouettes of buildings, shadows of rural architectures (water towers, windmills). These paintings “are perfect abstract geometric pieces”, Eva Grinstein states in the presentation text; they convey “a disturbing message: that city which [in earlier paintings] clung to the limit of the visible, has begun to disappear.”
