Oswaldo Vigas. Ceremoniales. Obras recientes
Centro Armitano de Arte, Caracas, Venezuela
Septiembre - Octubre 1989
“… Latin America is a land loaded with mysterious signs and obscure portents. Telluric symbols, magic and exorcism are the deep components of our condition. At the same time that they reveal our essential nature, those symbols place us and involve us in a world of disturbing ferment..."
Oswaldo Vigas
It has been for years since Oswaldo Vigas offered us a one-man show. He certainly had not disappeared from the face of the earth, which would be unthinkable of him, not only because of his participation in some shows and open invitations to his atelier —where it is possible to follow step-by-step the insistent torment that he inflicts upon himself and his paintings— but also because of those brilliant and controversial articles that he publishes every once in a while regarding the present and the possible changes in our culture. Nevertheless, it does not matter how much one believes he is familiar with Vigas' work, when one is before a group of paintings specially chosen for an exhibit, one is surprised by his radical implantation in the middle of the extra-ordinary, his linguistic coherency and his legitimacy, or if one prefers, his credibility.
Basically, there are three different aspects of the same: a life, which for more than forty years, has been determined in knowing how to hear the confused rumor that comes from the most remote archemyths of humanity and from the deepest level of the artist's psyche; to prefigure and praise that marvelous and frightful wealth, collective and at the same time individual; and give it form and visibility, with a style not only nurtured from ones' self, but from being an American. Vigas is very conscious of this and so stated last year in an unpublished interview: "In my work there are forms apprehended from archaic art but also when I paint there is a lot of people behind me (those masters whom I most admire and the great ancestors of our America and of the African kingdoms). One is not totally free; all of those human beings and cultures are influencing what we do. Furthermore, when painting one works with elements from an irrational world ordered and then transformed into an image. To organize the irrational and make it visible, that is creation."
And it is not a common "making visible", if we understand this as a simply used daily term. Especially since those first witches painted during the 50's, Vigas penetrates deeply into the extra-ordinary, into a universe that until then had been passed over in Venezuelan plastic arts: the ancestral world of sorcery, of myths and magic, subjacent but not because of this inert, below the "rational", technological and utilitarian crust extended throughout our society. Yesterday as today, Vigas' painting makes the un-usual Bloom before our perception because it expresses (not registers) images, pulsations, gestures, ceremonies, environments and atmospheres of the hidden; and not because they are not typical of the bespangled Latin American essence, they are always present and, above all, manifest with so much density of feeling and so much artistic quality, that we see today in this exhibit and this is not a fleeting and short-lived success. In order to create and show us these works —Liturgical, the most recent, for example— to extract and shape his characters, Vigas has not been satisfied, as has Orfeus, with only one descent into the abyss: during decades his artistic life has been and is one of an incessant explorer into the subterranean American essence, to then return and offer us his astonished and surprising icons, always rejuvenated by his personal vision and by his style, which consists in "a constant and inexpugnable manner of seeing things" - as was noted by B. Berenson. That style is the linguistic coherency which we pointed out at the beginning, that is to possess the capability to consequently express oneself in the different phases of an extensive creative process.
With frightening lucidity (anticipating his own destiny), since 1950 this artist shapes the basic, concentrated, archetypical elements of the greater part of his ulterior plastic discourse and course. Obviously, this does not mean that from the beginning Vigas has had a secret iconographic repertoire which appeared throughout the years, but also to know and cultivate the proper aptitudes, the most intimate and fertile e vital field from where to go giving form and symbol to creatures in renovated and coherent gestation. If Vigas' personages appear to be foreseen and, at the same time, unknown, it is due to the profound authenticity which marks all great painting, to that "inexpugnable vision" from one who knows that only the image is truly valid, that the Universe itself is pure image.
In Vigas, authenticity also means legitimacy and credibility, because in his work the universal has turned inward, without mannerisms or peripherical residuals. If, as has been said, culture is what is left when one has forgotten all that has been learned, then Vigas' painting has its own and nontransferable worth, its legitimacy, upon assuming the great languages of contemporary art, but with an unmistakable attitude born of the tormented roots of Latin America. Because of this, because of being able to distinguish between that which is essentially authentic and that which is irremediably foreign, Vigas' work is credible. Which is a lot to say in these days, because it. Presents itself not only as a paradigm of an aesthetics, but also of something that perhaps we need even more: an ethics.
Carlos Silva. Caracas, August 1989
...His prophetic appeal interprets the dream we all share: these promises of dawn, this anticipation that we have of an unexpected transfiguration, this desire of enjoying at last a transmutation among the human, animal and vegetable kingdoms, the power of incantation that remains so inaccessible..."
Gastón Diehl. París, 1978"...Oswaldo Vigas' work adds a new wall in the construction of the spanish-american structure which we are all eager to continue. Today, when foreign aesthetics influence the fine arts of the continent, it is on example of search, constancy and faith..."
Sebastián Romero. Bogotá, 1973..."The Caribbean, vertebra of the two Americas, is achieving its myth through many of its painters. (...). Oswaldo Vigas' paintings corroborate this..."
José María Moreno Galván. Madrid, 1955"...Vibrating in color, tense in the form, baroque in the composition within an unstable equilibrium, american in the roots which are sustaining his inspiration, Oswaldo Vigas' work has an indisputable place in the plastic arts of our continent..."
Rafael Squirru. Buenos Aires, 1979"...Mystery always has a diabolical and infernal side, full of suffering. The being loses his human aspect and becomes a pawn in the middle of an unmerciful and incomprehensible destiny. The brush stroke is rigid, precise, and the figuration is allusive. Vigas creates telluric monsters like those of primitive mysteries..."
Karl K. Ringström. París, 1964"...Vigas belongs to a notable contemporary lineage. ... I place in that lineage all those valuable latin american artists who follow faithfully a point of view, without accepting modifications imposed from outside by the pressure of fashion or the urgency of change...
...Each period of his work comes out from the earlier one as a formal and expressive need... Besides, within his works, among one and another, there is not a lineal progression, nor a single going forward, but o/ten he retraces and retakes an attitude and a subject matter under differents points of view..."
Marta Traba. Caracas, 1973
"...In these moments an art like Vigas' presents itself with special clarity and urgency. For those being able to read in his canvases the dialogue between myth and abstract gesture, between post and present, and between the individual and the collective consciousness of a race, the work of Vigas offers an approach to sensitiveness profoundly poetic and human. (...). ...Vigas represents a new kind of consciousness in Latin American art... He sees the symbol, or a new way to forging symbols, as a powerful avenue for creating art".
Ricardo Pau Llosa. Miami, 1986
"…The resplendence of color, the firmness of writing, the dull pushes of a material always in evolution, create imperious dramatic tensions which Vigas keeps and exalts until the extreme limits of its resonance..."
Raoul Jean Moulin. París, 1963