ALIOSSO: SIMONE PELLEGRINI

ONLINE VIEWING ROOM | APRIL 2 - MAY 16, 2026

The outline of my works is never attributed to anything specific. Rather it acts as a target of interpretation, open to whomever dives into this inner world –

-Simone Pellegrini quoted in Simone Pellegrini – An Anarchic Geography, Paolo Campione in conversation with the artist, Museo Delle Culture, Lugano, Italy, 2022

Cavin-Morris is honored to present our second one-person presentation of drawings by Italian artist Simone Pelligrini.  

It is significant that Pellegrini’s mother was an archaeologist who often took him to the digs she was working on when he was a child.  Strata or layers of earth do not always adhere to a temporal logic. The globe itself can shift and shake and move objects over time in an ancient and glorious percussive improvisation, changing configurations and leaving spatial relationships temporary or accidental.  Displacement can be determined externally on the surface by rain or wind or flood and internally by igneous movement and the slow grinding shift of layers through time, moving and changing the congruities of buried or hidden man-made objects both monumental and personally small, secular and spiritual. Pelligrini becomes a force of Nature as he uses these seemingly random arrangements of ambiguous yet familiar forms to create charts of the history of human imagination.  They are chart-like drawings or drawing-like charts.

In his drawings ambiguity becomes its own raw definitive.  This is endemic to a mythological world view.  Pelligrini’s drawings are an intriguing and compelling form of visual language, not quite asemic because asemic exists in a negation of meaning and there is nothing in a drawing by Pelligrini that indicates it has NO meaning, nothing that says it denies its own existence. Asemic means without specific meaning. 

It is interesting to compare his use of worked paper with the way the Mexican artist Martín Ramírez used it. Both artists created patchwork backdrops for their highly symbolic marks, though Ramirez indicated complicated storylines and Pelligrini deliberately only suggests myriad stories in his non-specific visual compilations of seemingly cultural marks. 

Pelligrini’s forms are deeper than words, they awaken dream forms in his viewer— they are a different, more mysterious form of communication, beyond writing. They are the multilayered communications on the walls of the human skull-cave.

I conceive the piece horizontally, gradually adding on to it, proceeding bit by bit.

I fill the soul not the paper.

I see the work in its wholeness only once it’s hung and the work is finished

-Simone Pellegrini quoted in Simone Pellegrini – An Anarchic Geography