Curatorial Review
by Oleksandr Dyvnich
Claudi Piripippi’s practice has long treated the environmental crisis as inseparable from the self, and the recent turn announced in the artist’s statement — from ecology as external subject to the “inner environment” as terrain — reads less like a rupture than a deepening of a position already visible in the images gathered here. What changes is the camera’s aperture: it swings inward, but the vocabulary of roots, water, and creaturely hybridity that structured the earlier plastic-bag landscapes persists almost intact, now grafted onto the body itself.What we encounter here is a genuinely interdisciplinary practice in which the image-as-document is consistently subordinated to the image-as-score: an instruction set, a proposition, a space for the viewer’s body to complete what the artist’s hand has begun.
Claudi Piripippi | Jolly Lolly Love, Instructions for Four Interactive Poems | 2025
The interactive poem series (Jolly Lolly Love, Sright, Nonbinary Equality) constitutes the most formally rigorous strand in this selection. The typographic poems operate within a concrete poetry tradition that runs from Emmett Williams through to feminist visual language experiments, but Piripippi’s addition of participatory instruction — “repeat after me each word crescendo from whisper to loudest,” “make a V sign with your fingers, place it on your mouth” — introduces a performative dimension that distinguishes the work from mere text-art. The most quietly precise image in the entire selection is Portal: a hand held open against the spiral centre of an agave, the plant’s geometry rhyming bodily openness with botanical architecture.
Claudi Piripippi | Self-Portrait | 2021
It asks nothing of the viewer beyond attention, and attention is exactly what it rewards. Whether Piripippi intends it as the most “straightforwardly photographic” work or whether that is simply a function of its subject matter, it demonstrates an eye for scale and formal correspondence that the digital composites, for all their ambition, do not consistently sustain.
Claudi Piripippi | Portal
The composite works — Pull yourself together (and let go), You Are Not in My Scream! and Selfportrait — pursue a more maximalist route: skin, bioluminescent jellyfish, root systems, cormorants and mermaid-scaled limbs are pressed together in translucent, tilted planes, the digital equivalent of a palimpsest. This is where the biography’s language of trauma, ancestry and “cosmic pain” is most directly staged, and the ambition is legible — a body that is porous to species, to grief, to inheritance not of its own choosing. But density here sometimes works against the images rather than for them.
Claudi Piripippi | Script, Instructions for an Interactive Poem | 2024
When every surface is doing symbolic duty at once — bird as omen, root as nervous system, scale as skin — the eye has nowhere to rest, and the emotional charge that any one element might carry gets diluted by its neighbours. The screaming, root-mouthed figure in You Are Not in My Scream! is genuinely unsettling in isolation; surrounded by quite so much incident, it competes with itself for attention.
Claudi Piripippi | Pull Yourself Together (and Let Go) | 2023
The statement’s most interesting proposition — that personal transformation might itself be a form of social engagement — is easier to argue in writing than in image, and the collages don’t yet resolve that tension. They gesture toward the political (whiteness, inherited harm, the “myth of normal”) through atmosphere and accumulation rather than through any single legible move, so the political charge risks being read as mood rather than argument. A viewer unfamiliar with the accompanying text would likely see mythic hybridity and ecological grief before they saw anything specific to the artist’s stated reckoning with German-Italian whiteness or intergenerational trauma. That is not necessarily a flaw — ambiguity has its own value — but it does mean the images currently lean on the statement to carry meaning the pictures don’t fully carry alone.
Claudi Piripippi | You Are Not in My Scream! | 2023
Given the range on display — plastics work exhibited internationally, a Joan Mitchell Foundation and Pollock-Krasner history, an MFA under Suzanne Lacy, a published retrospective of her earlier works with bags, ending with recent pieces that point toward a new beginning — the discipline shown in the agave photograph feels like the more promising direction for the “new bio” the artist describes. The collages prove the artist can hold enormous amounts of material at once; the next step may be trusting a single gesture, as in that photograph, to carry as much weight as a dozen layered ones. If the goal is genuinely to make the inner landscape as legible as the outer one, a sharper edit — fewer species, fewer textures, more negative space — would likely serve the work’s emotional claims better than further accumulation.
