20-27 November 2011 with Gallery Majke Hüsstege NL
In hoc signo
Solo Exhibition
Arte Boccanera Gallery, Trento IT Address: via Milano 128/130 Trento IT Opening : from Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am - 1 pm / 4 pm - 7 pm
"Eight wooden sculptures in full relief and worked in the round; they rise up with all their mass and volume, with all the weight of their material in the space they are placed in. Eight forms that in many cases seem concerned only with themselves and their own internal system of formal relationships and meanings, fully in the ancient and modern statuary tradition. But the sharp and embattled handling with which Willy Verginer (Bressanone, 1957) provokes and caresses wood does not result in anything archaic or hieratic: he does not make statues, totems or menhirs but images in action; they clearly show the work of the gouge, the plane, and the rasp: "all tools with short, hard names that, to those with a good eye, still seem to be in action" (G. Bachelard).
His human-scale persons have no connotations for recognition but live in a kind of abstract dimension. They stand erect without being monumental, they are sublime without being heroic. In order to draw attention to themselves they only have their pose to help them: minimal, almost banal and insignificant, gestures, but gestures that give their utmost to express themselves, to communicate more than their physical presence.
They bring these sculptures to another level of reality: they are as solid as the earth and find their drive and their life in the atmosphere that surrounds them. So much so that each figure is both one and many, single yet spread beyond its boundaries, almost as though to create a magical installation. And what underlines this sense of dilatation and visual extension are the gazes of these personages which only scrutinize emptiness: what might seem blindness, the denial of vision, in fact develops implicit potentials, the tales that each image bears within itself. And then there is the hazard of paint: yet even the colour does not block the narration but subverts it; it does not characterize faces, bodies, and clothes but zones, areas, almost as though to suggest unexpected analogies, unforeseen spatial symmetries. In this show Verginer reduces his range of colours to the nudity of wood and to grey-violet veiling ; in other words, there is a confrontation between light and shade, hiding and revelation. Only the parts continually exchange places: darkness allows light to float and light cloaks the darkness.
What is the boundary? What is the secret of wood (or rather, of the "wooden figure")? What is the real time-space of these elusive bodies? What is their Sign? (Luigi Meneghelli)
