DANI VERGES
There’s a universality to the cowboy. But as a boy growing up in Barcelona, it wasn’t the Spanish vaquero but the image of the American cowboy and scenes of the American West that captured his eye and imagination. “I really loved how it made me dream—those skies, those landscapes,” says artist Dani Vergés of a connection that first stirred in childhood, when he would watch John Wayne movies with his grandfather. “I don’t know why it affected me so much.” He started sketching Western scenes, and his affinity even extended to music. From trips to the States, he recounts, his mother would bring back country and western records for him as presents. It was an amusing fixation, since no one he knew was remotely interested in the all-American genre. “For whatever reason,” says Vergés of those Western tunes and images, “it gave me a sort of peace.”