Willy Verginer/Hero

Willy Verginer
hero 
linden tree wood and acrylic paint, h 180 cm, 2009

a passage from the Pierluigi Basso Fossali’s text, appeared on semioticaviva:
[…] However, “La pierre de la folie” has offered a link with Schinwald’s work, with the presence of “Hero” by Willy Verginer, artist native of the Alto Adige area who possesses a very controlled planning quality, organized in cycles. Hero belongs to the “A fior di pelle” cycle, but to a somatization of the emotion that the title suggests, corresponds an installation made of a central male figure, perfectly composed, typical of a model, if not even of an android placed in a determined space, without any autonomy. The artwork is made of wood, but the colour makes it even colder, fashioning an even more defined opposition between the upper and lower parts of the figure (respectively painted violet and white). The expression “a fior di pelle” (“skin-deep” in English) becomes, from a metaphor, a catachresis, seeing as a floral motif is stamped all over the hero’s body (the expression “a fior di pelle” literally could be translated to “as shallow and delicate as a flower on your skin”). It isn’t an ornament, though, but rather a wallpaper decoration, dislocated in the part of the body defined by the white, and corresponding to the torso and the final section of its limbs. The violet of the upper bust of the figure, for contrast, is a colour homogeneously laid down and coordinated with the chromatic data of a series of small objects, all alike, equipped with a central, round body but possessing sharp extremities growing from the sides of the sphere. The inexplicable and precarious stability of these objects seems to suggest the interpretation according to which they would represent a “thinking down to earth”, a series of stones, birthed by the hero, but that don’t ornate him anymore. The “alien” nature of these non-flying-objects is put in contrast with the chromatic accordance of the violet that associates them with the naked figure. The taxonomic impropriety of the objects (to which class should they be ascribed?) contrasts with the canonicity of the model. Moreover, the statuesque stability of the hero comes to be opposed to the synergy of relationships that seems to be putting these musical stones in order; yes, because the shape and precarious stability anticipate their swaying, while their rhythmic disposition in the space, in addition to their structural instability, seems to be foreshadowing a pattern, a score of mutual influences. Of the heroism only the posture remains; the body soars to the state of human parameter of reference for the space, but its modular proposal is immediately proven wrong by the superfluous decorative excesses and by this dispersal of objects that doesn’t follow any proportion. As a figure that puts the audience’s gaze in a central position, the hero doesn’t seem to have neither a weapon, nor any glory whatsoever, dispersed in a pattern of rare meaninglessness. The duality of a body half decorative and half devolved to self-projection into objects (the colour seems to be giving dignity of creation, of “childbirth” to these small planets grounded on the floor’s ecliptic) seems to illustrate an aesthetic calling together reflective (decoration on one’s own body) and transitive (harmony of the spheres). But the semantic value of the action, usually in memory of the idea of hero, here looks to be flipped over in a double passivation, in a double order imposed from the outside. […]


artwork part of
la pierre de la folie
curated by alberto zanchetta
sass muss, sass de mura building
30 july – 4 september 2011