A kaleidoscopic game of reflective, silent, profound glances make up the crowded installation by the artist Bruno Pellegrino on display at the Corner of the MAXXI from 6 to 8 September 2022 in via Guido Reni 4a, in Rome. Conceived as an emotional tunnel, the exhibition presents sixty-three two-dimensional painted iron sculptures depicting intense and highly expressive faces, six large masks and a multisensory projection that involves the viewer in an inclusive experience. also accompanied and escorted along the path that opens up to the experience of a visual journey between anonymous or perhaps familiar, real or perhaps only imaginary faces.This series of works by Pellegrino is inspired by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s masterpiece The fourth state (1901) , in particular it echoes the attractive force, the iconic presence of the characters and their determined advance and impose themselves on the front line and on the foreground of the image. But in a radically different context, in which the person surpasses the group, the mass. With “Personae”, Pellegrino returns to deepen one of the themes that particularly solicit his artistic investigation, the human being, and he does so by investigating issues such as individuality and diversity, loneliness and the crowd, at the same time questioning the relationship between reality and representation, between the synthesis of form and the abstraction of color. These themes are expressed in the artist’s work through a pictorial and sculptural practice in which they seem to merge the different inflections and variegated peculiarities of the great tradition of the portrait. An artistic genre that differently connotes and crosses the history and arts of all cultures, eastern and western, from the Coptic one to the modern and contemporary one, and whose purpose has always been to investigate the sphere, the existential sphere psychology of the human being.Thanks to the symbolic strength of the artistic gesture, Pellegrino presents his hypothetical sampling of people, personalities and characters, in a choral parade of emotional presences.