Willy Verginer | Anthropocene

Willy Verginer ‘Anthropocene’

The poetics of Willy Verginer and the theme of the lost garden coincide in Verginer’s second solo exhibition at Zemack Contemporary Art (ZCA) opening on April 20 to May 26.

Anthropocene, which defines a period of time during which human activities have impacted the environment enough to constitute a distinct geological change, is a subject critical to Verginer’s being and artistic language.  He constantly pursues his artistic investigation on the topical theme of the loss of beauty and biodiversity of our planet.

The dramatic lament of our garden-planet continues to influence the sculptural poetics of the Italian artist Willy Verginer. In the summer of 2022, the artist’s site-specific exhibition entitled The Lost Garden, at the church of San Barnaba in Bondo, Italy, began his artistic conversation of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  Verginer placed animals on top of the Church altar, balanced on the Baroque candelabra, asking the viewer to comprehend the effect of technology on our surroundings – immediate and personal and also natural surroundings.

In the new exhibition at ZCA, the artist guides the viewer into a conversation about our actions that are leading to a scorched and desolate landscape generated by climate change that is already showing in certain places on Earth.

Verginer’s sculptural narration in Anthropocene keeps the theme open through the unsettling presence of matter, the wood of burnt trees, in dialogue with other works that embody the new sensibility that is budding in the concrete action of the younger generations. Once again Verginer delivers the possibility of change to those adolescent bodies.

The exhibition in ZCA includes a series of new sculptures using mediums of wood and bronze.  One of the exhibited sculptures, ‘Paradise Trees’ is a large site-specific installation that includes three young figures of various ages, ascending ZCA’s 6-meter wall. Verginer depicts humanity’s ability to rise towards a different world.  The figures have plants and long wood branches extending from their fingertips connecting humanity and our role which is part and parcel with nature.

In his sculpture, ‘The Human Whisperer’, Verginer continues the discourse that he has been pursuing for years, always in dialogue with humanity and its contradictions, its background noise, whispering possible poetic phrases through the breath of a deer in the ear of a child trying to rise.

The Garden of Eden – represented in the pictorial tradition as a ‘Hortus Deliciarum’ (Garden of Delights), where plants, fruits and flowers are luxuriant – is transformed for Verginer into a path between aridity and timid sprouts, proposing a reflection on the present, marked by the increasingly unsustainable impact of man on Earth. This path, which began as humanity’s desire to explore and oppose instruction and to take a bite from the forbidden fruit, is a path we are on that must be recognized and corrected. Verginer tries to set a path to change which must be taken and traveled on in order to have a future.

Curator: Yaron Haramati