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ON CLAUDE KARFIOL'S NOBODY’S GHOST 2026
Essay by Alexandra Steinacker-Clark
Theatrical, haunting, and provocative are some ways to describe NOBODY’S GHOST (The Clown) by Swiss artist Claude Karfiol. With artistic roots in theater, and the avant-garde Swiss performance scene of the 1980s, Karfiol interweaves theater, technology, questions of identity, and the role of the artist into this work. The clown figure, originating from medieval court jesters and the Italian comedia del' arte tradition, faces the viewer, hauntingly unidentifiable, obscured by slashes of blues, yellows, and greys swarming the figure's head. A joyful, comedic figure becomes a reminder and an intruder, interfering in our contented everyday lives.
Even more, is the way in which this image has come to be. The isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic’s
mandated quarantines meant to Karfiol, having transitioned from the performance to the visual arts for years, that he no longer had access to his studio and materials for painting. Although a complete novice to the digital, a creative outlet for his practice was found - through the very same program with which I am writing this text, Office Word. The word-processing program, originally designed to type, edit, and save text documents, is not the software one would expect a visual artist to gravitate towards. Through this experimentation, using his mouse to essentially hand-draw sketches and transform them into a final composition, Karfiol developed a unique technique. [...]
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