PPP pinkypussypunk, kaufmann repetto, Milano

The exhibition pinkypussypunk brings together the works produced in this new phase in the lives of the members of the Atelier dell’Errore collective. The sexless insects of the age of gold have become pubescent creatures with new anatomical attributes, unmistakably sexual. The children from the workshops of twenty years ago have become young adults, and sex lies at the center of their imaginary, their thoughts, their impulses. The monstrous creatures once conceived as guardian animals against the bullying suffered at school become libidinous creatures, giving form to desire. The explosion of acrylic colors and flesh-pink tones goes hand in hand with the shift in subject matter in the new works from the Unknown Pleasures series, which makes that desire explicit and adopts the famously libertine deities of Greek mythology in order to speak of autoeroticism, arousal, loss of control: Hyper Sexy Aphrodite (2025) welcomes visitors and guards the space, imperious yet fragile. In the adjoining room, a special display designed by the collective recounts, like a classical frieze, the adventures of six characters from AdE’s personal mythology. Melusine Blow Up Doll, Countess BatHorny, Priapo Orchitico Capezzoluto, Urechis Ero-Thanatos, Hyper Sexy Aphrodite, Pegging Gimp Girl are the materialization of a sexuality and a desire that loudly proclaims its own existence, even though it cannot be acted upon.

On the opposite side of the gallery, a new series, Black Pearls Penguins, is less explicit but, if possible, even more disturbing, especially for those who suffer from trypophobia: a more or less intense form of repulsion that some people feel when faced with surfaces filled with small, irregular, closely clustered holes.

Trypophobia does not appear in diagnostic manuals, but in many cases it provokes reactions of disgust, discomfort, or even fear that are incomprehensible to those who do not experience it. You may discover that you are affected by it by looking closely at All Yours or Venus birthing from an egg. But even if you do not belong to that ten to fifteen percent of the population for whom these images produce shivers and a sense of unease, they will certainly not leave you indifferent — just as the titles that accompany them cannot help but elicit a smile and a sense of admiration: Daphne Brood Mother, Jumping Pleasure, Tickle me till I shiver, I melt with desire, Put your finger in my ribs, I fuck you till you love me, Penguin Milking Gland, Amikiri spreading for birth, Surgery Gender Affirmation Operationing. As one might intuit, each of these characters has a story to tell, of which its visual materialization is only the loose end of the thread. Some of these stories can be heard in the living voices of their creators thanks to the video PINK! is the warmest colour, a special tour of the exhibition filmed in a single sequence shot and included in the show. In the final room, the path concludes with an almost mystical vision, thanks to a new experiment with materials that gives rise to Glowing Vulvae. Three vulvae drawn by the collective with acrylic colors and markers on a transparent material, Melinex, transform the last room into a chapel bathed in the colors of a psychedelic sunset.

On the basement floor, the play of mythological references continues: the acronym of Atelier dell’Errore is AdE, the god who presides over the underworld. The collective that bears his name has interpreted the lower level of the gallery as a chthonic world, renamed the Chamber of Vulvae (Cueva Tito Bustillo), where everything is drawn in pencil on paper, a return to the collective’s origins. The title of this room comes from another very famous “hole”: the Cueva de Tito Bustillo, a cave decorated by human beings before 10,000 BCE and discovered in 1968 by a group of young speleologists in Asturias. In the original cave, alongside many drawings of horses, deer, and other animals, there appears a series of representations of female genitalia outlined in red, believed to have been intended as invocations of fertility. The Vulvae Family Tree is the collective’s own invocation: a family tree in which thirty vulvae are represented as proud, hypertrophic creatures, a gallery of portraits whose underlying theme seems to be the genesis of life. This family tree also offers a possible key to reading the large work Arakne’s SexToy, which appears as the point of connection between the works on the ground floor and those in this room. In scale and explicitly sexual content, the work engages with the colorful deities of the Unknown Pleasures series, but the pencil line that extends to the edges of the paper, creating an inextricable web, seems to distance it from those noisy creatures, as though this were the wise ancestor that generated them all. A great spider mother — the insects of the beginning return — from whom all the others have emerged, one by one, to conquer the world.

– Marta Papini


Ph. Andrea Rossetti
Courtesy of kaufmann repetto Milan / New York