Willy Verginer. Hopscotch

Monograph published on the occasion of the exhibition “Willy Verginer. Hopscotch", 15 October 2020 – 28 February 2021, Raffaelli Art Studio, Trent.

Odles, Steles, Straw, and Plains: with these four Ladin words, which each indicate a different stage of the wood, Willy Verginer describes the material he works with, giving life to narratives on the thread of the absurd.
Per Hopscotch, his first solo show at the Raffaelli Art Studio in Trento, the artist from Val Gardena presents a new series of works whose theme revolves around the "game of the world", present in all cultures and paradigm of life itself. Starting with the cult book of the same name by Julio Cortázar, Verginer's work unfolds through a sculptural path in which the main protagonist is the wooden material, worked with craftsmanship and painted according to the symbolic density of color.

“I felt I was looking for new ideas, and it came into my hands, by chance, Julio Cortázar's book, a cult book called Rayuela; it is very special because it can be read in every sense, from the last page to the first and vice versa and I was so impressed and fascinated because it is full of stimuli, simply coming from small pages. Every job, every new topic I deal with, looks out slowly, and continues with a very creative period. It is the moment I am in now.
Rayuela is the Spanish term for the game of the world, an ancient game present in many cultures. The boys draw an ideal map on the ground that starts from the earth and reaches the sky, through intermediate stages marked with numbered squares, on which they jump following the throw of a pebble. In this game I see a metaphor for life: our life is full of these leaps, of these obstacles. Each of us aims to reach a kind of sky ".
_Willy Verginer from the interview with Camilla Nacci in the catalog