Producing nested texts seems to me an excellent idea. Less because I generally believe in the importance of the new, as modern art demands as a code, but because this self-chosen form – the writing of texts, poems on partly also torn boxes – provides a certain framework, which on the one hand prevents the texts from getting out of hand, on the other hand pushes the author to often very concise statements. And these are, as we know Peter Paul Wiplinger, often painfully political, which means: Wiplinger relentlessly records grievances that cry out to heaven, often going beyond his own pain threshold.
While in the first nesting texts (from 2007) it was often memories of the Nazi era that he pressed into the nesting form for current occasions or strangled reminiscences, the impressions of the many drowned refugees in the Mediterranean flood (somehow boundlessly) his soul and his writing. Wiplinger can't or won't set up mental boundaries to muffle and filter his compassion, anger, pain; so it writes and screams out of him – a berserker of compassion or an angry saint and co-suffering agnostic accusing God and the world for all the tribulation that beats humanity. The collection of his autographs, written on cardboard with felt-tip pens and other writing utensils, is not lacking in aesthetics, due to the color background, the nice typeface and the shape of the boxes – their outlines, holes or inscriptions, which he includes in his work.
However, it is not exclusively political, accusatory writings collected in the extensive volume. For example, a box text reads: "Being smart is no use at all!". He continues: "One must also have a feeling for people, my mother said when I was half-grown. // And now that I am as old as she was when she gave me this truth for my life's journey, I know how right she was when she said this to me, and I only half listened to what she kept telling me. // Yes, you have to look at people, at everyone and at every single person, otherwise you will miss life and yourself."Wisdom also speaks from the following autograph: "Thought prison. Always being in thought, constantly thinking something whatever, thinking – this must! Being in a thought prison, being locked up in one's thoughts, in one's ego!"
An original text called "Bankgeschäfte", written on a paper bag from Bank Austria/Uni Credit, in which Wiplinger accuses banks, rich people and dictators. On a white carrier bag at the beginning of the volume Wiplinger wrote one of the first box texts. Wholesale chains and food multinationals would be blessed if they took up such an exquisite idea of enhancing their paper shopping bags with poems, so that tomorrow's customers in the public transport system will try to fathom the shopping bags of their counterparts instead of staring at their smartphones. The strong volume also contains highly poetic texts: "The day shines silver, but the night is deep blue, you sing a song and say a word, you fall into silence, make sure that the sun doesn't burn you and that the moon doesn't make you drunk or sleepless"! // Silver dew shines in the morning on grasses and bushes and sometimes like a tear on your cheeks, beloved. // Let's go around our lives like in a glider, silently floating in the air, high above the earth, weightless and as if in a dream…" One would do P.P. Wiplinger now, however, wrong to quote the entire poem. An overhang of poetry, of private mood, of roses, night, silver blurred the pressing explosiveness of the overall impression – which is rather to be found in the following box text: "The boat has sunk, people are drifting helplessly in the sea, women are holding their children tightly by their clothes, men are screaming, old people are sinking first, quite silently, women have to decide which child they will let go of first; one after the other drowns, at last also the mother. With their backs up they float in the sea in high waves; a picture like in a movie, but all this is reality!" (29.3.2016).
Even if the author is well aware of the limitations that arise from resources for integration and cultural adaptation, in the boundless heart he is a great compassionate who, with all misgivings, raises a loud voice for the individual, for the tormented creature from the past to the often bitter today. With which he also often makes it personally difficult for himself, like a box text, which testifies to his unwillingness not to get upset all the time … Healthier, perhaps, would be at times not to look. But Peter Paul Wiplinger sees exactly. For me he differs essentially from the negative writers of modern attitude, who have devoted themselves to the present dictate of black painting and disruption. He seems to be truly overcome by pain, does not take it as an aesthetic gimmick, as a framework within which to formulate and fabulate. His pain reaches deep into his own soul – from there drones out the sometimes even inhuman cry. But reconciliation, devotion and patience also wait there: wisdom, which he shows himself ready to find in any case, whereby the contemplative act of writing legibly, almost beautifully by hand, which likewise tames the thoughts, is not to be underestimated. Sodass Wiplinger's nesting texts are pleasantly different from the present day apostles of obscurity.