‘Sleeper Wave’ at Elizabeth Moss Galleries: Jenna Pirello’s Pictorial Gesture Against Impermanence

By Manuela Annamaria Accinno May 12th, 2026

In the perpetual oscillation between memory and oblivion, human transience manifests itself as a subtle rhythm that shapes our sense of being alive: not so much a frightening end, but a constant movement that reminds us of our place within a wider current. It is from this tension that we can read Virginia Woolf and Jenna Pirello’s “Sleeper Wave” series together, two seemingly distant voices that instead engage in a profound dialogue on the nature of time, social change and painting as a gesture that attempts to halt impermanence whilst preserving its momentum.

The intrinsic reference to Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” is not merely a literary citation but an existential paradigm: Woolf weaves individual consciousnesses into a single sonic fabric, showing how each person, unique yet inseparable, follows the destiny of a wave in the flow of existence. Those pages are a stream of voices that overlap, dissolve and re-emerge, and in their continuous motion reveal the fragile glory of the human being: the precariousness of the individual against the immutable process of time. In this narrative body, society appears as an uninterrupted procession, made up of habits, slow transformations and sudden upheavals of meaning that rewrite codes and roles; personal history thus merges with collective history, and social change becomes part of the very fabric of the psyche.

Jenna Pirello, Sleeper Wave, Acrylic on panel, 24 x 36 in

In her series ‘Sleeper Wave’, Jenna Pirello translates this philosophy of transition into her paintings. Her canvases, marked by movement and color, embody both internal and external storms: it is not a question of depicting the sea as a neutral landscape, but of using natural forces as an active metaphor for contemporary life. Pirello’s painterly gesture is a body in motion, a hand that follows waves of pigment, leaving traces of collisions, overlaps and dissolutions. The colors are not decoration but an emotional framework: tones that layer, intermingle and wear away, expressing the speed with which social relationships change, the pressure of time and individual resistance in the face of advancing modernity. 

Jenna Pirello, Storm Warning VIII, Acrylic on panel, 12 x 9 in

Both Woolf and Pirello present a shared dynamic: the idea that every existence is simultaneously subject and landscape, that the self is always already shaped by larger currents. Where Woolf’s writing destabilizes the perception of time through inner currents and multiple dialogues, Pirello’s painting instead fixes that instability in chromatic figures in perpetual transformation, turning the canvas into a surface where the social procession appears as a wave that never ceases to wash up on the shore. Both works also explore the relationship between the individual and the collective: the individual emerges as a luminous moment and then dissolves, leaving behind layers that shape the sensibility of others.

Jenna Pirello, Storm Warning VI, Acrylic on panel, 12 x 9 in 

The result of this intermedia encounter is a vision in which transience is not merely loss but an aesthetic and political condition: to acknowledge precariousness is to understand that social change is at once violent and creative, destructive and generative. Pirello’s painting, evoking storms and natural forces, compels us to view contemporary transformations not as an external accident but as a living matter that engulfs the collective body. Woolf, with her prose that resonates with the waves of being, teaches us to receive this matter without illusions, to listen to the song in which every life is both a fragment and a contribution to a wider movement. In this fusion of word and color, of motion and memory, a powerful allegory emerges: humanity as a continuous flow, society as a procession that transforms and is transformed, and art as the sole means, fragile yet necessary, to make visible that which is by nature destined to disappear.

Jenna Pirello, Cloudbusting, Acrylic on panel, 36 x 48 in

Jenna Pirello is on at Elizabeth Moss Galleries April 17th - June 13th 2026