Cuneo, Michele Pellegrino's 50-year career in an exhibition

Photographer Michele Pellegrino will be the star of an exhibition to be held at the San Francesco Monumental Complex in Cuneo from July 19 to Sept. 30. “Michele Pellegrino. A photographic parable,” this is the title, traces the Cuneo photographer’s 50-year career through an itinerary divided into 19 sections displaying a total of 75 photographs.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the writer Cesare Pavese, also from Cuneo and whose 110th birthday falls this year, who in a 1949 letter, published in the collection Lettere 1926 - 1950(Einaudi 1968), referring to his novel “Paesi tuoi,” states: "The work is a symbol where both the characters and the environment are means to the narration of a paraboletta, which is the ultimate root of narration and interest: the ’path of the soul’ of my Divine Comedy." Pellegrino and Pavese, as well as their hometown, share an impatience with the label of realist and naturalist storyteller, when, in fact, it is the symbolic value of places and characters that attracts the attention of both and is the keystone of the exhibition project.

Like anthropological fossils, men and women “out of time” ogle from intense black-and-white prints. Ghostly villages, haunted by presences that seem straight out of a neo-Gothic novel, bear witness to an unprecedented look at the geography of Piedmont. Sublime peaks reveal the artist’s love of mountain nature, often captured in its hermitic or gloomy aspect.

Among the most valuable chapters is the reportage "Fathers and Sisters," the result of the eight years between 1972 and 1980 that the photographer devoted to religious people who, with radical choice, withdraw from society and history. Up to the most recent projects, in which the human figure gradually disappears to make way for inanimate subjects and places where the only life is mineral, in slow and imperceptible evolution.

Curated by Enzo Biffi Gentili, the exhibition will be accompanied by the volume "Storie," a special monograph on Pellegrino’s entire oeuvre, with critical texts by Biffi Gentili and Walter Guadagnini.
Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. Closed Mondays. Free admission.

Pictured: Michele Pellegrino, Visages de la Contemplation, 1980.

Cuneo, Michele Pellegrino's 50-year career in an exhibition

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