Oswaldo Vigas. “Mutants, pélélés, controsionnistes et autres zigotos…”
La tour des cardinaux Galerie d´art, Francia.
24 Juin au 30 juillet, 1995

Unfinished Paradise

 The retrospective exhibition of Vigas’ work that was held in the autumn of 1993 at the Louis XVI room of the Palacio de La Monnaie in Paris marked a new stage in the recognition of Latin American art today. We had waited for it so long that we had nothing else to do but rejoicing! That is because, in the vast field of contemporary art, Oswaldo Vigas has been one of the main pioneers.

We were also surprised by this significant fact: the Palacio de La Monnaie is a few steps from rue Dauphine, where, in the 50s, Vigas landed from Venezuela, from out of nowhere, and occupied a modest room that also served as a studio. This was at the Hôtel D'Aubusson, near the famous Le Tabou, a jazz and poetry cellar (almost a crypt) frequented by Claude Luter, Juliette Greco, Boris Vian and many others who had long belonged to the legend of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Sartre himself used to visit the place with who were denominated as existentialists, a denomination that makes us smile today. Europe was in a process of recovery from the consequences of war and the whole world was looking for a new story. The luck that Latin American artists such as Vigas had was that the essential for them, identity and modernity, had not yet been invented.

In the field of art, which drew only a few “existentialists”, the game was played between surrealism and abstraction while the royalty of Picasso, who transcended all styles, was growing. Vigas, as he had to, demonstrated his admiration and visited him in La Californie. He also frequented the studios of Wifredo Lam and Matta, the two masters of Latin American surrealism; this did not impede him to associate with the realization of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, a work he elaborated in Paris with the constructivists who had the Denise René gallery as starting point.

However, Vigas will not fully adhere to neither of these two trends: he will choose a third way not too different from that of my friends in the CoBrA group, which could be a kind of transatlantic projection. The more uncertain the riskier, he was simultaneously in two contradictory but complementary directions, creating an open osmotic system: the experimentation with new forms and the search for essential, archetypal forms. The original and the initial.

What I saw in the early 60s in the small studio on rue Dauphine convincingly illustrated that this election would be, as I was sure, the most fertile for the development of contemporary art. Our mutual understanding was immediate and our friendship, that has never disappointed us, is renewed in each one of our meetings in Paris or Caracas.

With paintings, sculptures, tapestries and ceramics, Vigas’ work combines modernity, a free creation without end or law, with the revitalized Caribbean tradition, its inevitable mythical, with its “convulsive or harmonious Lyricism”, to use the words of the Venezuelan poet Juan Liscano. Yes, the original and the initial. The years that led the critical decisions of the small studio on rue Dauphine to the consecration in the neoclassical paneling of Quai Conti, are the same as the ones of the coming of this new New World which is the Latin American art, with its demons and wonders.

An unfinished paradise: the title of a recent painting of Vigas seems emblematic of his work. What does it show us, in fact, but a timeless genesis of forms, an experimental biology where kingdoms engage upon each other: the human, the vegetable, the animal and the mineral? Long ago, our deep imaginary consisted of sphinxes and chimeras. Now we have, thanks to Vigas, Piedras fértiles, the Árbol animal that will multiply, a Personaje vegetal from the baroque jungle, and many more. Is not the unfinished paradise just the lost and found paradise, Christopher Columbus’ fantasy and ours? “Beings, plants and vermin must have been together once, making one body. I attempt to bring together what should never have been separated”, Vigas said one day.

How could the cultural mix of the Latin-Indian America be better illustrated, but with the combination of natural forms? Once again, the necessity creates the organ!

But necessity is a too Darwinian term; it is rather the inner necessity that speaks: the one of the artist who knows no rest. It is precisely here that unexpected characters require appearing in Vigas’ painting: “My monsters amuse me, they agitate me”, he said. Some are from the adolescence; others are from yesterday, just after the retrospective at the Quai Conti. Was it too solemn with ministers, ambassadors and art critics? Now, include the Contortionists...

Jean-Clarence Lambert

April 1995

An unusual and fascinating world

 As he usually does, Vigas overtakes concentration and alternations of enthusiasm to take a break, which, ultimately, is in a balance.

After the considerable efforts that he had to deploy two years ago for the selection, the shipping and the installation of about 150 works including paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and jewelry for his impressive retrospective at the Palacio de La Monnaie in Paris, and tapestries for the Maison de l'Amérique latine, didn’t our friend feel the need to relax, to take a break? He allowed himself a moment of reflection, of questioning, while engaged, as usual, to an even more active work stimulated by the success in recent years. He alternately was in Monaco, in Quai de Conti in Paris and recently on Mazarine Street.

Today, he presents this in different facets: paintings, pastels and pictographs, all derived from a new language, simple and relaxed at the same time, with less materials and colors, often dominated by a line that once again shows a surprisingly creative freedom.

Let there be no mistake. In the disarming simplicity of appearance, his expression has this own revitalizing force. Far from abandoning this mythical feeling that inhabited ​him and made him become the great defender of the continent, he transforms and amplifies it by injecting it a daily dose of humility. Is not it the origin of the myths to face during the existence? Transcribed sometimes more familiarly, closer or easier to interpret, maintaining its often strange or mysterious character. The deep bonds that tie our painter so closely to his homeland and its distant beliefs live so intensely that they reflect the omnipresence of destiny.

I do not want to try the vital dynamism, the sometimes feverish agitation that takes over these creatures to the point of distorting and almost twisting them. It is precisely this extreme animation that shows how our artist is reunited with ease in this imaginary universe that became his long ago and in which he is the absolute and only master of his kind for his perseverance and prolific production?

With such skill and agility he moves, in the narrow field of his pastels, the elegant fragile silhouettes reduced to a revived filigree by some tonal accent in a discreet background, but in monumental suggestion. Such a development is even more evident in what he calls his pictographs, of joyful spontaneity.

The result of a longer maturing and questioning work, his pictorial creations do not lose their intuitive gesture and their natural inspiration. In his representations of sometimes fragmented, broken contours, of multicolored borders with a winged appearance, he continued combining living beings, deities of yesterday or today. However, they often generate an anxious wait, a deaf concern, especially in the wild outbursts of his bestiary marked by intense pulses colored by lacerated rigorous touches.

A curious and exciting marriage between austerity, softness, irony or violence, thus betraying the complex mixture of impatience, euphoria and anxiety that reveal the passionate atmosphere in which our intense creator works.

Undoubtedly, such results seem a bit difficult to approach and to decipher at first for the European eyes, that the expressive baroque inherent in all Latin America never stops baffling. Yet, only an effort of attention, a second reading, is enough to easily enter this unusual and fascinating world. Who can then resist the many delights offered by his color variety, his impetuous inner drive, and his poetic openness to the imaginary constantly nourished by a deep spirituality? There is no doubt that Oswaldo Vigas will continue knowing how to surprise us in the future, preserving the essential substance of which he is the valuable custodian for many decades.

Gaston Diehl

March, 1995