Oswaldo Vigas. The contemporary and the archaic
Grupo Li Centro de Arte, Caracas, Venezuela
Julio 1999
A long time ago somebody looking at my paintings said to me: "Vigas, you are in prehistory!..."
That never offended me, but I only understood it when I found myself in front of the parietal graffitis of the Lascaux caves.
Then, I also had the perception that it was possible that before the spoken language was born, the images must have appeared first.
I think that the archaic feeling is the most vital part of contemporary art. In the most recent stages of my work, hardly freed from some rational attachments, those that had kept us blocked up for thousands of years, I feel each time closer to the same primitive call that gave life to those men from the caves, and I think in how much we have lost when we submitted ourselves to the demands of our civilization. When we left earthly paradise, where all natural realms were united, we chose the wrong road.
Maybe the most transcendental aspect of modern art is to have opened the return "towards the obscure knots, where time vertiginously goes back, as a cascade that returns to its origin." (Dan Haulica, París, 1993)
Oswaldo Vigas. Caracas, mayo de 1999.
"....His prophetic appeal interprets the dream we all share, this promises of dawn, this anticipation that we have of an unexpected transfiguration, this power of transmutation among the human, animal and vegetable kingdoms, this desire of incantation that remains too inaccessible...."
Gastón Diehl, París 1978.
"....An art as 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 past and present and between the individual and the collective consciousness of a race, the work of Vigas offers an approach to a sensitiveness profoundly poetic and human...."
Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Miami 1986.
“Oswaldo Vigas is one of the true innovators of latin american art. ...He belongs among those who have contributed the most to keeping alive the natural cultural elements of his continent, which are as he himself has defined: "of pre-logic character, magic, mythological, non-rationalist ". ...Vigas has been able to make an original synthesis in his work, something personal between these preserved "natural tendencies" and the more contemporary explorations of the creators of modernism..."
Jean Clarence Lambert, París 1993.
"...Oswaldo Vigas transforms paint and space in explosions of rapture and ecstasy.Carefully thought out lines and colors, but at the same time freed in the creative act by the anxieties of life and death. ...Vigas's life and work are a contained storm that blows up giving birth to this creative act. This can be perceived in his ideas, in his behavior and in his art. He manages to fully create forms that transcend their origin and lead us from birth to death and rebirth, mutating into aesthetic prophecies..."
Eduardo Planchart Licea, Caracas 1993.
"The paintings of Vigas have their own non-transferable value, because they incorporate the great languages of contemporary plastic art, but with an unmistakable sense of being born in tormented latin american roots. For that reason, for being able to distinguish what is authentic and what is hopelessly foreign, Vigas’s painting is credible. Which is no minor achievement in this times, because it implies not only an aesthetic paradigm but something we need even more: an ethical one."
Carlos Silva, Caracas 1999.
"... Constantly opening roads within a world of legends and fabulous characters, more than ever, inventiveness, freedom and the vitality of his pictorial lenguage are at the service of the marvelous. In his recent works, the background in sand and bloodied earth colors bite like a scalpel gnawed surfaces of white beaches. The lines scratch the surface, create the form, and thus the sarabande comes to life and retreats until it disappears from view. In this grand planetary fresco that aspires to approximate nature's kingdoms, the personal theater of Oswaldo and his fantastic bestiary, his devils and chimeras, are a prophetic call for all of us.”
Isabelle de Mere, Aix-en-Provence 1995.