Willy Verginer is nowadays considered one of the leaders of magic realism. His distinctive style has garnered him much attention, and his works have been exhibited around the globe. Simultaneously lifelike and whimsical, Verginer’s wooden sculptures are dipped in bold colours and patterns, lending a touch of surrealism to what is initially figurative. Worked in the round in full relief, the sculptures rise up from their mass and material weight into their surrounding space. Verginer’s sharp and at times embattled handling of the wood manifests something altogether new from a rather ancient material and art form. Willy Verginer doesn’t make statues; rather, he creates images in action.

Italian artist Willy Verginer depicts our evolving relationship with nature in these adolescent sculptures.
Willy Verginer's half-dipped, wooden sculptures create a visual contrast that highlight environmental issues at the hands of human manifest destiny. Verginer's work plays off human innocence and the ensuing corruption, while examining our effects on nature at the hands of moral shortfalls. Verginer sculpts his pieces using locally grown wood, while finishing with a strategic placement of paint. By using a dark color like black paint, the artist shows depictions of environmental destruction as objects like oil begin to encroach on a beautiful but tragically unaware deer. 

ARTICLE IN FRENCH | Connais-tu la légende des « âmes scellées » ? Le célèbre récit né au cœur des imposantesmontagnes des Dolomites, en Italie. L’histoire relate comment Mère nature a mené au tombeau des Hommes en les emprisonnant dans des essences d’arbres suite à leurs méfaits à son égard.

Beaucoup ont émis des doutes sur ce récit, jugé trop absurde. Et les années ne feraient que renforcer cette idée. Cependant, un évènement est venu bouleverser les esprits et contrarier les plus sceptiques. La découverte de ces fameuses âmes.

Italian sculptor Willy Verginer (previously) creates figurative sculptures from wood, pieces that allow his carving skills to stand out with minimal additions of monochrome bands of paint. The oranges, greens, and blues he adds places his subjects into unseen environments, like his sculpture of a small child who appears to swim through detritus covered in dark blue paint. Other sculptures also point towards environmental decay, such as a figure that clutches a leaking gas can, and a stag that is altered by the oil canisters that serves as its base.

Verginer’s astonishing wood carvings were the jumping-off point for this exhibition. The Italian artist comes from Ortisei in South Tyrol, Italy — a small village that’s known internationally for its centuries-old trade of religious wood carvings. This art has been passed down through families and generations, and Verginer represents a new school, diverging from the traditional religious motifs to apply the trade to fine art sculpture. Yet the roots of the work are clear: there’s something both narrative and didactic about his carved tableaux, to say nothing of their painstaking detail and execution.

ARTICLE IN FRENCH | S'il y avait "buzz" ou "feed" dans le nom de notre beau magazine (hem...), on aurait pu intituler cet article : "ce qu'il fait avec une tronçonneuse va vous étonner." En effet, Willy Verginer travaille tout d'abord à la tronçonneuse (avant de passer à la finition au burin) pour réaliser ces sculptures extraordinairement fines qui s'avèrent exclusivement constituées... de bois. Né en 1957, cet artiste italien a eu l'occasion de se faire un beau petit nom dans le monde de l'Art, puisque ces dernières années, ses oeuvres ont été exposées dans le monde entier (et notamment à la 54ème Biennale d'Art contemporain de Venise).

Italian sculptor Willy Verginer carves ultra-realistic characters in human dimensions out of wood. With remarkable precision and attention to details, he showcases ordinary individuals sometimes combined with significant objects or animals. The oranges, greens and blues he adds places his subjects into unseen environments. 

[ARTICLE EN ANGLAIS] Stumbling upon the work of Italian sculptor Willy Verginer can only dazzle. Born in 1957, the artist carves his masterpieces out of lime tree wood and covers them with detail-less tint areas of acrylic paint and gold. 
His statues can be isolated, or gathered in groups, depending of the mood of their creator. They are young women and men, still children and teenagers, extracting themselves from a coating of flowers, like buds of humanity ready to blossom. The Italian expression used to name this series is ‘a fior di pelle’, describing hyper sensitivity and translated verbatim means: ‘to flower of skin’, a very poetic meaning to express the fragility of the youth and the ability to dream.