Renata Pelegrini has a BFA in Fine Arts, BAs in Language Teaching and in Education. She is also a translator and has a Neurolinguistics Diploma. Having majored in painting, Renata has worked her expression around figuration and abstraction, using this layer-in-between to communicate her belief in a more porous experience in art.
Calligraphy was one of Pelegrini’s triggers to her artistic work, back then in New York, in the 90's. The massive training in this field intensified her awareness of the movements of the hand and body, like: pressure, direction and angulation, while she worked with artists, in Italy and Switzerland, in the 2010’s. This continuous exercise has guided the artist in her process for more than 25 years now.
More recently, and particularly during the pandemic, Renata’s research has focused on the Anthropocene era and the tensions that cross our habitat in the present time_ when the destruction of the environment has reached unprecedented levels. In 2020, such issues have brought the far from serene expression of the artist to encounter, in Venice, the Ocean University in which_ for the third semester now_ scientists, biologists and artists share some common interest for Mother Nature.
How can art contribute to discussions about new ways of living in this globe? To call attention to possibilities of collaboration and engagement between humans and non-humans, scientific and ecological knowledge, Renata proposes an answer with "a story of the possible" by creating some new creatures she names EPIPHYTES. Inspired by a group of plants that live together for support, Pelegrini creates this collective of beings to rethink the conciliation of what is different: hard and soft textures, strong and fragile materials, presence and absence notions of space.
In another series, ATTACCATI, Renata is vocal about her caring attitude and ecological concerns, making the process and the context of the making of the work, become visible. In this series, the use of pharmaceutical adhesive bandages to connect pieces of paper create a larger support for the painting. In the removal of the tape, as the work is finished, one can witness the empty space, like a scar, in which the fictional landscape has its nature missing.
EPIPHYTES and ATTACCATI both express Renata Pelegrini’s desire for conciliation and belief in interdependency, issues that have always been present in her art expression. These two series present the artist’s understanding that a new grammar to inhabit our planet is urgent and necessary.
