Oswaldo Vigas. Image of an Expressive Identity. Paintings 1966 - 1977
Gallery of the National Institute of Culture, Museum of Italian Art, Lima, Peru
July 12-August 7, 1977

Something of great important is the presence of an Oswaldo Vigas exhibition of in Peru.

Something that transcends the fact of his individual quality as an artist, that reaches the unquestionable merit of being a magnificent representative of an urgent concern present not only in the current Venezuelan artistic creation environment, but also of the most utter urgency in the scope of Latin America.

Oswaldo Vigas is absolute, total, vitally committed to the anxious search for indigenous roots that must rise through their own images, in order to find the strong and deep expressive language of our mestizo reality.

Rebellious indefatigable, intellectually aggressive, Vigas as a painter is the author of a fascinating magical and tremendous world like the tropical forests, humid and sensual as its atmosphere; his famous "witches" are despotic emissaries of a lush land.

Vigas extracts from his determined and visceral forms a cadenced rhythm where pride is no stranger, and in which, the wild is another important form of what is fully alive.

In the often misunderstood and complicated search for "identity" that many artists have undertaken in our countries, Vigas’ work already occupies an important place because of the quality of his effort, and for his self-imposed towards the strictness of his goal.

The main goal is the encounter with these more foreboded than defined characters, and its transcription to the image, the most powerful element of immediate impact. The admiration for what the former embodiments, the passion for folk expressions and the chromatic overflow as a sensitive explosion were, cannot be indifferent to this anxiety.

This exhibition marks a milestone and begins a confrontation and dialogue phase. An encounter with an active and powerful voice within the living Venezuelan art; a perhaps surprising and unexpected meeting for many; for others, the reaffirmation that Latin American art today has come of age.

Elida Román, Director
Lima, May 19th, 1977
Gallery of the National Institute of Culture

Vigas: Image of an expressive identity

It is not easy to admit that painting may have another function than to express how much the artist wants to say about himself, freely and by his own means. Normally this is what the avant-garde painter in Latin America has been making. Even though he has created a very personal language, he cannot forget that his essential vocabulary, the alphabet, so to speak, is taken from European art and, more often, from the international tendencies that in a given time were fashionable and end up affecting him. But if he has had some success with his work, the representativeness of that success by which he becomes an artist of a specific country, exempts him of making other questions that are not the ones that refer exclusively to his existence and his personal work. Creation is a very private matter. If some human position has to be assumed, the work must be set aside. The artist is a being, isolated from the people, living for himself on the small summit of national well-earned reputation by dint of sacrifices, grants, scholarships and, most often, a lot of work.

What needs to be asked, as Oswaldo Vigas himself is doing in Venezuela, is whether this excessive business of producing personal art works, whatever its value, can follow the same rhythm, at the same gallop, infinitely, without becoming necessary to stop and ask about the relationship that may exist in so much isolated effort, so much work without destination, and into what extent can an identity background be found into all that in which we can recognize ourselves as Latin Americans.

I admit that this was not the kind of proposition that I should have started this article with. But it's hard not express it having in front a controversial artist like Vigas, who, even in his work and further in his ideas, continues to consider the same questions. After all, his work can give us his answer. Vigas, by the way, has been asking this himself for some years, particularly since the late 40s.

The works included in this exhibition have a retrospective character, but do not reflect the periods encompassed by them more than some aspects of the extensive production of Vigas. The oldest work dates from 1966, a year when the painter lived in Merida and was in charge of the Department of Culture of the University of the Andes. In Mérida, his work had undergone a change in relation to the theme and technique. One can say that at this time the painter became aware of what had been in him the most prominent expressive features of his style. But we should first explain what was involved in this change. Vigas worked on a second stay in Paris between 1959 and 1964. It is the time when he reaches an approach that we can relate to informalism and which regarding the order of color, continued to be a personal work, on the technical order that meant to him to assume the gestures and / or a concern for the texture and luminosity that would result, later, when he took up the issue of his series of the witches, in a freer, large, or so to say, dramatic way. Except for the informalist period just mentioned, all the work of Vigas is based on a constructive-linear element that reveals itself as the work structure and which gives the figurative character that has prevailed all along its evolution. The novelty brought to the Venezuelan paint with the "witches" series, which Vigas introduced in the 50s, consisted precisely in the natural way that this painter could ascribe a deep lyrical quality to a seemingly spontaneous compositional structure but strict in the background; a structure in which the drawing stroke fitted the monochrome harmony, giving rise to an extremely synthetic vision. The general trend of the Venezuelan painting in the 50s was oriented towards geometries and although by this time constructive abstraction came to prevail, there were artists like Vigas, reluctant to be totally aseptic from the media, evolved without sacrificing geometry from its organic conception of the world. Vigas also went through a stage of development of processes that led, through the analysis of form, to certain types of geometric abstraction, but in him it did not mean a process that led him neither to break with his previous work nor to despoil it of an organic affiliation that came from the surreal world of "the witches". The works with which from 1965 Vigas restates the problem of his expressive identity, apart from being a rejection of informal abstraction, are in the evolutionary path that, looking back, originates in the approach of " the  witches". The organic elements are suggested in these works by the linear structure that boosts the plains treated with inks in order to obtain smooth surfaces and flat spaces. The aristae and angular linearism of the "the witches" is a vague reminiscence. The next step, represented by the works of 1966-1967, brings us perhaps to one of the most inspirational moments of Vigas’ path. We refer to a group of works which mark the beginning of an evolution that reaches until today. The form is infused into space-matter, for which figure and background emerge in the plane to have the same harmonic value. The color is vibrant and pasty and we find here the telluric surface.

Henceforth, Vigas’ work follows the course of its own development; it seems that from 1970 until today, the essential are not the changes, but to explore a reserved domain for the search of a greater authenticity. The process of painting wants to escape from the personal feeling in order to be inserted into a cosmic vision. But the content of the images remains in an area of the subconscious and to be recovered, these require strong impulses that put gestures into play. 

Hence, these impulses are followed by deliberation, to the change of formats through a scale that go from very reduced proportions, up to wall scales dimensions. In this projection, each issue or set of issues develops in a serial form, until they are exhausted. A series where white intonation happens predominantly is followed by one in which the dominant color is yellow ocher or blue. Vigas’ world opens in front of a forest where the trees and the sound foliage start to take a fantastic consistency.

We pass quickly from detail to the general plane, in relation to which the picture becomes a trimmed fragment. Forests or imagined real worlds, in the work of Vigas, we do not know whether the image is the end of the dream or the beginning of the awakening.

Caracas, june, 1977
Juan Calzadilla, Management Consultant

Galería de Arte Nacional