Simone Pellegrini - Jorge Mayet "Arriaca"

Montoro12 Contemporary Art is delighted to present Arriaca, the first bi-personal exhibition in Rome by Simone Pellegrini and Jorge Mayet, curated by Alberto Dambruoso. The exhibition will occupy the two gallery’s rooms, colouring them with the artworks that distinguish Pellegrini’s unique style, along with Mayet’s arbours floating sculptures. Arriaca, from Arabic “river of stones”, is the ancient name used to identify the Spanish City of Guadalajara, which historically has been one of the first point of convergence between the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religion. The term is also used to indicate an ideal point where iconic and aniconic are conciliated together, as shown in the artists’ works.
During the opening it will be presented Simone Pellegrini’s catalogue with Alberto Dambruoso’s critical text ("Arriaca", Edizioni Baskerville).
Simone Pellegrini’s artworks, present simple, almost primitive forms outlined by the rhythms and motifs suggested by the traced lines, which by varying in intensity, from thin to think, from light to darker, have the function to create, embrace, and decor. The figures that animate Pellegrini’s works, like Vario Diafano and Trame, present utterly organic characteristics, both human and natural that, when presented one next to the other, lose their original meaning in favour of new interpretations suggested by the reading of the work in its wholeness, as opposed to individual signs. The composition’s plot seems to be formed by a connective tissue which is arranged in a heterogeneous order and that follows its parties’ structural organisation. Simone Pellegrini’s oeuvre is permeated by instincts that aim at redefining man and the world. It is noticeable, in Pellegrini’s research, the recurrence of the sign that goes beyond the Eurocentric symbology and confide itself in the freed semantic association, opening up extra pictorial and extra narrative interpretations.
In the same way, Mayet’s artworks, such as De Yemaya and Equilibristas de la Habana, present pure organic qualities, given by the reproduction, with paper and other materials, of natural elements like trees, roots, and clumps of earth. In Mayet’s allegoric language, nature and artificial are combined together creating an enigmatic atmosphere, which is mostly given by the natural elements’ birth and growth within an utterly artificial context, such as that of a gallery space. Driven by the socio-political ruptures that break apart the relation between populations and their natural habitat, Mayet creates real-life tree forms with roots that seem to never touch the ground, as if in a perpetual changing. The artist uses trees as a symbolic icon able to resist such disastrous conditions, by creating objects that exist in their own image. Indeed, it is the Cuban artist’s photographic memory that delineates the artworks’ forms and colours. His real-life trees, which roots has been left floating in the air, as opposed to be deeply rooted, seem to function as a reference to the exiles’ weight, the distance from his own cultural roots.