The Metabolic Margins of Simone Pellegrini: Aesthetic Alchemy and the Summoning of Ghosts

Simone Pellegrini’s (*1972) work exists in a liminal space where the residue of historical consciousness and the materiality of the mark converge. His practice is not contemporary in the sense dictated by the art market’s temporal conceits, nor does it adhere to the self-referential hermeticism of academic modernism. Instead, it emerges from a deeper strata—one that is part archaeology, part mystical conjuration. Born in Ancona and raised in an environment steeped in his mother’s archaeological vocation, Pellegrini was early attuned to the palimpsestic nature of history. Yet, rather than merely excavating the past, he constructs a space where the past manifests itself in spectral figuration.

His refusal to align with the mainstream discourse of contemporary Italian art has led him toward the periphery—a space where Art Brut, medieval illuminations, and esoteric traditions intersect. While not an outsider in the strictest sense, given his academic training and teaching role at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Pellegrini’s oeuvre is defined by a deliberate distancing from institutional conventions. His work has found a home in Paris, New York, and at the museum gugging near Vienna, a center known for championing Art Brut, underscoring his affinity with artistic languages that resist categorization.

Pellegrini’s process is an act of structured surrender. He begins by accumulating knowledge—an internalized archive of philosophical, literary, and spiritual texts—before allowing his hand to move beyond the exhaustion of language. He describes this transition as a necessary departure from the limits of the written word. When language reaches its threshold, it collapses into form, and it is within this collapse that Pellegrini situates his artistic practice. His studio walls are inscribed with fragments of text—lines by Camus, Bolaño, Lispector, Kafka, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault, and Agamben—forming a living palimpsest that speaks to him as he works. His affinity for poetry, particularly the works of Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Bloch, Esenin, and Jabès, further accentuates his preoccupation with the porous boundary between text and image.

The act of drawing, for Pellegrini, is a metaphysical negotiation. His compositions emerge through an indirect process, wherein he transfers pigment onto paper via intermediary matrices—small paper fragments that act as filters. These matrices, once imbued with charcoal and linseed oil, are pressed onto the final surface with an iron object resembling a stamp. The result is a parataxis of negatives, an articulation of absence that conjures the presence of lost voices. The paper itself is a constructed terrain, made from torn and reassembled fragments, bearing seams and scars that act as silent witnesses to his process. This method is not merely a technique but a statement of ontological significance: the surface is never a tabula rasa but a site of spectral accumulation. The paper is inhabited before the first mark is made, its ghosts awaiting their summons.

French philosophy, particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and his interpretation of Foucault, profoundly informs Pellegrini’s conceptual approach. Deleuze’s notion of ‘the outside’—a force that structures itself into being before entering reality—resonates with Pellegrini’s own understanding of artistic process. His work exists in a metabolic margin, a transitional space where meaning is not imposed but gradually reveals itself. There is an undeniable ritualistic quality to his approach, an invocation of unseen forces that shape the work beyond the artist’s conscious intent. Yves Bonnefoy’s assertion that ‘the only true thought is the one that thinks the unthinkable’ echoes through Pellegrini’s practice: his compositions are structured encounters with the ineffable, with signs that refuse stable interpretation.

The notion of beauty as a product of rupture rather than harmony is central to Pellegrini’s philosophy. He recalls the work of Adolf Wölfli, whose violent history gave rise to intricate, hypnotic compositions, challenging the classical assumption that beauty begets beauty. Instead, Pellegrini asks: what if beauty emerges from the abysmal, the impure, the fractured? His works, predominantly rendered in red and black, are not bound by binary oppositions but by an ever-expanding field of nuance. The attentive eye discerns subtle color variations, spectral traces of other hues that emerge through his method of pigment transfer. It is as if the surface itself resists finality, allowing latent histories to seep through.

Pellegrini’s refusal to consider his works as finished aligns with a broader metaphysical perspective. Like Cézanne, who claimed that ‘a work is never finished, a work must be abandoned,’ Pellegrini acknowledges that completion is an illusion. His process is one of continuous articulation, where the artwork ceases only because the artist has been exhausted. In this sense, his practice is not about resolution but about inhabiting an ever-shifting field of potentiality.

Through his deliberate anomalies—his rejection of direct mark-making, his insistence on fragmented surfaces, his trust in chance—Pellegrini disrupts conventional artistic hierarchies. His works are not static images but events, moments of becoming that invite viewers to navigate their own thresholds of meaning. As Nina Katschnig aptly describes, his papers are never empty; they are haunted by presences that negotiate their space within the composition. Pellegrini does not illustrate history—he conjures its ghosts, staging encounters between the visible and the absent, the known and the unknowable. His art is not a repository of meaning but a site of invocation, where the past and the possible converge in an uneasy yet compelling coexistence.