"Day-to-day existence cuts a varyingly clumsy, squirmy, dishevelled, feral, and oneric figure in Viridiana Morandi's quietly cornucopic POGO. The images - and their achingly endearing subjects, frequently in states of downright whimsical undress, captured in slapstick configurations akin to an R-rated Chaplin - assembled here occupy a canny cross-section of playful, tender, and comic-grotesque in their brazenness. Entirely devoid of judgment and sentimentality, the work instead teems with unblinkered affection and unsqueamish curiosity. One feels an urgent fondness for those depicted, as though cradling their very essence, keenly aware of the fragility with which one has been privileged and entrusted. No mere feat of artful petrification, Morandini is adroitly attuned to details that lively suggest fathoms (creases, suds, bruises) - fathoms which one yearns to gently plumb. She attests to her subjects' vitality so potently that their unthinkable senescence is creepingly conjured as inescapable counterpoint all throughout. POGO is a work of prodigious and intrepid compassion, that divines grace in the slovenly, the demented, and the morbid without depriving anything of its rightful nature, nor condescendingly submitting these facets to mere fringe delectation. It accomplishes that meanest of feats: temporarily rendering the much-bandied notion of unconditional love as not only tangible, but commonsensical."
- Joseph