Oswaldo Vigas Retrospective Exhibition
Ateneo de Valencia, Valencia, Venezuela
December 1964, January 1965

Vigas

The work of Oswaldo Vigas reveals a mysterious, complex, unusual world, ranging from post-impressionism to the gestural painting, moving through a ghostly figuration that could also be called magical, sometimes strongly drawn, sometimes evocative and allusive. His art is rich, varied, almost contradictory, but its development is organic and above all, logical.

Vigas’ painting translates spontaneity dominated by a strong will that reflects the deep conflict of his spirit, the perpetual struggle between his instinctive need to paint freely and the inability to break the security of the intellect, which is why we find in his work a tension, a stirring and profoundly human inner life.

Stubbornly and bravely he kept going without renouncing the most bold and daring experiences. Almost self-taught, his true masters were the museums and books. By practicing the craft, painting with intelligence and lucidity, he found the foundation upon which has been able to build his work. Open, sensitive, analytical and dreamer he does not get carried away only by immediate intuition but also makes a bridge between contemporary art and pre-Columbian art. His natural authenticity does not allow him to fatally Europeanize his pictorial language; above all, he remains deeply rooted to the native soil that nurtured and formed him.

Oswaldo Vigas was born on August 4th, 1926 in Valencia (Venezuela), where he did all his schooling and received his degree in 1946. In the mean time he had begun to paint alone because the city of Valencia did not have a School of Fine Arts. His early works were almost non-figurative with themes that are transposed to the point where any trace of representation disappears. Very soon, the painter Braulio Salazar, founder of the School of Fine Arts in that city, became interested in his work and started to encourage him.

Before leaving Valencia in 1946, with 20 years of age, he had already made three exhibitions (1943-45-46). He was offered a scholarship to study at the School of Fine Arts of Caracas, but instead he chose to go to Merida to study medicine.

In this Andean city, that neither had a School of Fine Arts, he continues to paint a purely figurative painting, distinguished by light, air and luminous background. Apart from a few still lifes, that show strong colors and rich matter, he felt particularly attracted by the human form which he approaches with great freedom. He soon achieves a very poetic expression in which the characters become mixed with the background; he abandons the classical perspective and the line is set in an imagined space. He then starts to work with the drawing, making it stronger, more visionary; while colors treated with impetus, become more violent; showing at this time an effort to eliminate the opposition between subject and background.

Suddenly, in 1947, he manages to paint a series of almost "cezanean" still lifes, in which every detail is distinctly drawn, the colors are finely crafted with impeccable technique and the whole is pervaded by a light that gives each object its intrinsic value. Starting from an almost non-figurative painting, going through cubism and through a free and lyrical impressionism, contrary to the normal development of the arts, he arrives to a more realistic painting. The independent, open and healthy Vigas’ spirit is manifested in this contradictory evolution. His art is neither free nor unconscious, even when he lets his imagination to act freely, achieving in an unusual way, extraordinary subjects, not to avoid certain pictorial problems, but to know them better and to be able to resolve them. His intellect allows him to release very personal images that take form by his imagination, characters that quickly resume a prominent place, and contours designed with great freedom, stand out clearly on the surface where they are integrated and lose their individuality almost become objects.

In the last days of 1948 he travels to Caracas in order to finish his medical studies and it is in that city where his syntax changes radically. By frequently visiting museums, he is amazed and excited by the pre-Columbian art; his paintings then become more ghostly by the free interpretation of an iconography that he has just learnt to appreciate and understand more. At the same time, he can at last, study in a school of fine arts, but his own researches and painting style are too advanced, both technical and human, to be able to take advantage of academic teaching.

In 1949 he begins a magical and pictorial-fantastic period in which dreams and reality blend into each other creating an amazing world. The color scale is deaf and mysterious, but also more sensitive, more subtle, the drawing becomes finer, more allusive, more contrasted, more aggressive, having always the mistery of a diabolical and infernal side, full of suffering. The being loses its human aspect, transforming into a pawn in the great game of a ruthless and incomprehensible destiny. Vigas’ trait is rigid, precise and his figuration is allusive, achieving telluric monsters; as the ones found in the early mysteries.

At the same time around 1950, in his work Imaginary animals, next to the human being who is still, until 1952, his main theme, with all that implies of intangible and unattainable.  The female theme of fertility, of the creative and prolix nature, of the being sentenced to death and eternal life. The background of his work is - and still is - essentially mystical, in a primitive way, but conceived by a lucid intelligence of the twentieth century.

At the end 1952, because of a reduction of his pictorial means, he achieves a semi-abstract painting, built by drawing; in which real forms, teeth, horns ... aggressive and infernal elements thrown into a world inhabited by monsters disembodied can be observed, all which depicts a primitive, merciless but very poetic imagery.

He completed his studies that same year and poses himself a serious problem: to be a painter or doctor. For several months he works in a Caracas hospital, but his artistic vocation is imposed imperiously. At the end 1952, having won the Venezuelan National Painting Prize, the John Boulton Award and the Arturo Michelena Award, he moves to Paris. This encounter with the center of the painting world barely changes his pictorial vision, but surely encourages and stimulates him. In 1953, he enrolls in lithography courses at the School of Fine Arts and also works in Parisian hospitals.

In 1954, his painting becomes almost non-figurative by removing the details (pictures very much constructed, as the four large mosaics he made for the University City of Caracas). This spirit did not correspond entirely to his temperament: he likes to build, but with absolute freedom, as shown by his works of 1956 whose subject is rich, with simple shapes, and a complex composition. However, these very abstract paintings express a powerful imaginative force; one can feel the presence of man, of alive and living forms. The art critic JM Moreno Galván writes: "I know, or pretend to have sufficient knowledge of the pictorial evolution of Vigas in order to guess, in his current, abstract painting, the natural offspring of his previous figurative painting. This evolution was made gradually with an exemplary coherence, with a primitive figuration that clearly responds to a presence of nature demons, animist demons, plants and even minerals in the American context where they were carried out.

The evolution of Vigas – and we must insist on this point - is manifested by a change in the form and not in reality, a reality which still is that of the demons, the demons of his homeland, reduced to its essential form." [1].

His 1957-1961 canvases go from an abstract expression of harmoniously rhythmic precise contours, to a non-figurative paint where forms are freely drawn on a rich and thick matter. Gaston Diehl, who has closely followed the progression of Vigas for years, says that "before reaching this dense expression punished with evident monumentality, Vigas had to proceed to a progressive liberalization of himself, of his technique, rejecting the easy paths, he had to submit to the strict discipline of a rigorous schematic in forms, give up, even temporarily, to the lovely attractions of the colored matter. Many tests, whose effects could be seen in his latest exhibition, which experimented with rare lucidity and of which he knew, at every opportunity, make the most so that his language could become more concise, more personal in the form and accent " [2].

Since 1960, his drawing becomes everyday less readable; It is entirely integrated into a dense, thick and carefully crafted matter to completely disappear in an unreal atmospheric level, perfectly balanced by a clever scale of almost very light, vaporized colors. Vigas translates the human mystery into both the density of an allusive, earthy pasta, and the lyricism that makes the world a dream without forms, without precise contents, though real for their hope, but with the certainty that the unreality belongs to man.

"His painting is robust and sensitive, his hand has real taste ... a tactile pleasure of matter that appears to be the transposition of a deeper taste of a warm, wet earth can be felt ... Vigas’ paintings start first as landscapes, then are images of the earth - to finally acquire, in their rough background, the higher quality of the walls where the dream, if not the magic begins ... Refusing any easy solution - they (the forms ) however, are not dissolved, are rather integrated into the solid space - and this has not only preserved but also increased its original power " [3].

Vigas does not completely abandon figuration; it remains, it persists, reborn in the maelstrom of forms, in his gestural and free to the extreme works achieved in 1962. The brushstrokes made quickly into the fabric, releases him of the perpetual custody of the intellect. By the "instinctive" gesture, the painters act is considered irrational, spontaneous, led by the forces of nature; It is a confirmation of that attitude found in Zen Buddhism: repeating a gesture or several gestures almost infinitely, perfection is achieved without thought or reflection in the act of execution; that would be so natural, so automatic as walking or breathing.

The act of painting, even being an act of liberation, is prior to all, a creation, and as such, it is subject to the mild composition. The creation itself is "indefinable", but the work achieved is the product of its completion. Currently Vigas has led the gestural painting to a breadth, fullness, where spontaneity is more dominated, more guarded. "With Vigas, the artistic activity does not have the exclusive purpose of the simple delight of the senses; it is, however, the manifestation of a personality, of a willingness to act on the world in order to master its forces and perform better, achieving  through its physical gesture, the artist confronts nature and test his very own nature " [4].

The mysteries we love are always present, but have been guarded randomly, without being calculated. This can be seen particularly in his later prints, just as important as fascinating. Here everything is perfectly orchestrated, the gesture, held back by the strength of the matter, is fully integrated into a living whole, real, that breathes and flourishes.

Karl k. Ringström
(Translation: Pierre de Place)

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