William Xerra. Salire il Golgota

This is an overview of the persistent interest by the artist William Xerra in subjects of a religious nature, in works dating from the 1970s and 1980s in which the artist used fragments of historic paintings sometimes inscribing the word alive on the copy of the Dead Christ by Mantegna executed in 1987 and the fourteen paintings of the Via Crucis (created in 1999, placing each work alongside a seventeenth century work depicting, in traditional iconography, the various stations of the cross), and finally in the paintings and installations of recent years, which are, in an almost exclusive way, distinguished by a meditation on aspects of human existence, the tragic events of our time, and by a tension between the sacred and the absolute.
William Xerra was born in Florence in 1937 and adopted Piacenza as his home. He has maintained a constant relationship with Reggio Emilia, through both a friendship with Corrado Costa and Marco Gerra and his numerous exhibitions beginning in the 1960s. Xerra's work has evolved mainly in relation to painting (his paintings with historic fragments glued to provisional frames are well known), but has been continuously enriched by a steady interest in poetry and literature in general and an experience of visual poetry (Xerra was a friend of Emilio Villa), by installations from the lapidi to the apparitions of the Madonna, due also to his association with Pierre Restany and by the creation of objects and sculpture.
Edited by Sandro Parmiggiani, the catalogue to the exhibition in Reggio Emilia includes a long interview with Xerra, a text by Remo Bodei and the reproduction of more than fifty works by the artist that document his increasing interest, from the 1960s to the present day, in subjects of a religious nature