Ritos Elementales, Dioses Oscuros. Oswaldo Vigas, exposición antológica
Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas.
April 29th to June 24th, 1979

Presentation
Manuel Espinoza

This retrospective exhibition of Oswaldo Vigas is part of an ambitious program of retrospectives that the National Art Gallery has devoted to the exposure of creators of significant trajectory in our contemporary art. Within this anthological program, already has been presented the work of Mercedes Pardo and the first steps for other assemblages such as the work of the Venezuelan-French artist Charles Ventrillon Hober are being taken.

The intention with these exhibitions is to collect and summarize the overall work of artists whose title of teachers could not be whisked away and whose individual work poses no reservation regarding the need to be evaluated, confronted and placed in the perspective of the history of our plastic ideas. Conceived as a tribute, as milestones of a sustained evolution, these exhibitions will enable them to ascertain the intrinsic value of those works and at the same time, measure their contribution, their relationships, their degree of impact in the context of the searches and movements that have left their traces in our country.

In order to achieve this kind of realization, the National Art Gallery faces the challenge of implementing as indeed has already been made, the accumulated experience in the three-year life of this institution. The organization of the exhibition, from the selection of the works, up to the assembly and production of the catalog, has involved equally, all the Departments in the National Art Gallery that provide a specialized task. But we cannot overlook the support that we have received from institutions and individuals, especially collectors, whose cooperation is an act of kindness that we feel compelled to publicly acknowledge here.

Oswaldo Vigas: Elementary rites, dark gods
Armando Romero, GAN.

It is possible to note, without being afraid of making a mistake, that the very establishment of our Latin American self, the more often engaged in a controversial series of influences, has guide lined a behavior or cultural development that not always obey established laws or foreseeable evolution codes. Although it seems illogical to suppose, this is one of the advantages we have to open the path of our own knowledge. The Direct experience, source of many Latin American creators, allows the leap of courage, and so, the access to a knowledge that would otherwise involve the repeating of searches that can end up having fixed or determined results. Departing from an almost childlike wisdom, the artist that is in his early stages, takes what nourishes him without stopping to look into the past. This remains for the future, as it should be.

Oswaldo Vigas beginnings in painting in 1942, match with these approaches because it is the strong momentum of the spontaneous and the intuitive what throws him to seek his light in a dreamlike abstraction, where elements of Cubism and surrealism are also mixed. The childish artist plays at will with forms, moving with special boldness through space as one who walks over a piano and gets the chance to randomly generate a coherent musical rhythm; and it is perhaps despite this burden of this inexperience that lightens him, that intuition has also showed him, from the beginning, the need for a structuring in the work: a desire to construct will always accompany him from now on.

Fantastic animals, birds, popular characters among devils and costumes, intermingle in a vegetable matter where blue predominates. As noted finely by Gaston Diehl, Vigas evokes "in his neat and richly colored oil paintings, in his gouaches and authoritarian drawings, an abstract universe of interlocked and strict forms, of mysterious blooms that had certain similarities with works by Kandinsky. Later, his surrealist character fantasy, brought forth a strange world of faces and birds, mixed into curvilinear rhythms that began to define volume and space. Reality intervened bias the slant of still life, resulting in feminine silhouettes of flexible geometric patterns with strong contours and ornate backgrounds "[1].

Like any artist, the work of Vigas could be interpreted through the lens of his passions and obsessions. One is the passion for the figure, which only very rarely will completely disappear from his work, and when it does, it is simply to reappear with greater energy, as if the artist needs to touch the land of what is human, in order to fly again with his image inside, returning whenever this image begins to blur. Thus, in his paintings between 1944 and 1945, Vigas gives way to a configuration where the characters are delineated with greater precision, and although always touched by this dreamlike atmosphere, the tones are smoothed to make way for a light that pervades through the whole picture, without further contrasts. However, the figure has already begun to suffer disturbances in the drawing.

After obtaining a scholarship to pursue his university studies, he moves to the city of Mérida. There, at the beginning, he gives way to a period in which he studies Cézanne. He paints outdoors, making notes of color that he then processes in his atelier. Forests, houses, figures with a thick, short stroke that sweeps the contours. Later, the figures tend to blend into the landscape, since they are treated in the same way and end up becoming part of it. According to the Norwegian art critic Karl K. Ringström: Vigas "abandons the classical perspective and the line is constructed in an imaginary space. He then works with the drawing, making it stronger, more visionary, while the colors, treated with momentum, become more violent; at that time he attempts to remove the opposition between the subject and the background. He later "achieves a series still lifes in the style of Cézanne”. 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. Departing from an almost non-figurative painting, continuing through cubism and a free and lyrical impressionism contrary to the normal development of the arts, he arrives to a rather realistic 'painting' [2].

Between 1948 and 1949, a time in which he gets settled in Caracas and regularly visits the School of Fine and Applied Arts and the Free Art Workshop; drawing regains its strength, it gets trimmed down, stressing the individuality of the figures, that now get customized, acting as independent entities as they progressively continue to get deformed. The colors are flat while at the same time are being lacerated by the dynamism of the stroke. The love for geometry is obvious, the love for the infinite structure of lines that lead to the secrecy of the composition.

Vigas then discovers in pre-Columbian ceramics and African art that persists in America, the music from totems and vertically erected figures, that will always observe us with their eyes focused far beyond any comprehension. The struggle to draw from the world all that belongs to him as an artist, takes him to the amazing conclusion that all that sacred matter was there all along, that his fate will assert what exists behind the visible, that he is the man from time of the ancient myths. And, therefore, a constant man, this is when one of them materializes: a veiled humor seeps through the figures as a mysterious fluid that serves to lubricate certain mechanisms that would otherwise crack. We could justly equate it to that mood of pre-Columbian figures, fear of so much origin. As the poet Juan Sanchez Peláez says: "If lyricism sometimes gives in to this plastic matter, the immediate gesture shuns the flattery of the senses, and becomes dramatic and tense, not exempt of a fierce melancholy or humor." [3]

This is why the critics will not cease to see in this period that extends until 1952 when the artist deepens in his search for new avenues, called "Period of Witches", a telluric stage, of dreamlike quality, magical, where the terrible thing is the angel that punishes the forms, so that they loosen their grip on the fantasy that struggles to emerge, loaded with a zoology of origins.

It is obvious that his work arouses heated controversies, which will result in press articles, comments, cartoons, etc., of the leading newspapers in Caracas and also impact on a group of artists who will continue his searches for some time. Miguel Otero Silva writes at that time: "(Vigas) has his own mystery, his own lines, his own colors. He paints with passionate depth, with torn sensitivity. Through modern lines he searches for the oldest artistic expression of our land. He has faith in his destiny as an artist. He awakens contradictory, vehement reactions of admiration or revulsion. I am among those who believe in the future of this young Venezuelan artist." [4]

Having finished his studies in 1951 and winning the National Plastic Arts Prize in 1952, Vigas prepares to leave for Paris, where he sets up his residence for several years. During this period, he undertakes a search that originates in his previous themes, and that gives way to new elements: curvilinear forms that evoke images related to an aggressive animal world, a world of spikes, teeth, claws.

The intense activity that Vigas unfolds in all his actions, allows him that his trip to Paris dos not delimit a change in his searches for themes of Caracas. He has taken a synthesis pathway that, as we said before, leads him to ask himself about certain avatars of the form. It is good to note here, that the painting of Vigas is evolutionary, not mutative: the origin is inside itself.

We can see, then, that from the fabric arise and remain attached to it fragments of a warm and tropical bestiary, as well as certain types of characters which in a strong process of despoil, retain only a bony structure that identifies them, even though a vibrant rhythm, of timpani and drum prevails in all of it. This period and those that will follow until his return to Venezuela in 1964 are not showed in this sample. However, we will refer to them because they are fundamental in his artistic evolution.

During these years the influence of geometrism had already been felt among Venezuelan painters, and Vigas, not far from these affections, turn up to the appointment with a face of absolute. The process is gradual, comes and goes, modulated by a constant vigilance and extreme strictness. But Vigas does not yield to that passion of totality; always critical, in search of his own identity, through channels close to constructivism, he will soon get rid of the integration aesthetic demands of the architecture, which had resulted in his murals for the University City of Caracas. Drawing that limits the figure increases, the line is thickened, everything is denser: volumes are built as blocks, masses of color. Vegetable objects, as he defines them. This period will end in a sterile, black on white constructivism.

Between 1957 and 1958 Vigas returned to Venezuela, making a pause in his creative work. He performs various exhibition and political activities, the latter linked to the fall of the dictatorship. Upon returning to France, he makes another pause, full of philosophical and religious questions. From this point on, it becomes evident a need to break that had not been typical of him, accessing to an organic informalism: exploration of matter with the predominance of white, until the achievement of dense masses. Aquiles Nazoa would accurately define it: "Telluric matters, ghostly affairs, resume every day in Oswaldo Vigas’ paintings the retrospective Odyssey of man in America searching for his origins. The painter has digressed many years in the helpless world of primal fears, one in which the colors still hasn’t been born yet, where vines and roots, moss and foliage, populate the childhood of species with horrific nocturnal visions. To communicate his melancholic 'journey to the seed' into images, Oswaldo Vigas practices some raw techniques, some matters that somehow relate to the idea of ​​fire; work surfaces that suggest a work of enamel, of crude mud for a brick, as well as oxides and ashes ". [5]

These surfaces will open, exploit, dragging behind a matter that will adhere to the painting, so then it can make way for a gesture marked and violated by the speed of the stroke. The chaos of creation allows the forms to integrate and disintegrate, creating figures of ghosts, which, in turn, are embodied in "The Personagrestes", which prelude the return to figuration: the need for land, the need for being that defines Vigas’ painting. The order is within the clutter of forms in gestation.

Due to the limitations purposes of this work, it would be long to extend us on this period. Let’s talk only about that ancient writing which is related to the writing of our deepest ancestors. The poet Robert Ganzo enlightens us on this: "A small and amazing prehistoric grotto, carved voluntarily into the rock in a Tille de France forest, has been, in our time, discovered intact. Its walls are completely covered with signs of a script whose meaning we can scarcely comprehend.

"Behold, engraved in stone, that Word that contains the essential facts of a genuine or invented Creation by man." This very ancient Word has been renewed by Oswaldo Vigas when, engraving these lines, these secret contours and shapes that concern us intimately restitute us with their apparently lost underground lights of distant nights." [6]

And by the use of the drawing and the engraving, from the use of the hardness of the material that specifies the form, a return to figuration is set at a time when, by paths of objective random, he also returns to Venezuela. The limited nature of this show does not include the expectation for a future review of them.

Vigas has returned to Venezuela and mysteriously, as if on that altar of the Andes the essences of his painting were present, he goes to Merida to settle down for some years. The violent stroke that corresponds to his previous stage continues, but he puts the figure in order, preserving gestural language while giving evidence of the tropical light that in a flora and flower senses and perceptions hurts him now deeply. The elements of a fantastic figuration, in an attempt to enrich the imagery itself, give rise to the "Las María Lienza" y "Las Señoras" series: "... A touch of repressed humor that never stopped surfacing in Vigas’ paintings, now triumphs with unrestrained freedom (...), where the irony does not deform, does not accuse, is not scathing, but simply uncover and cheerful. The poetic atmosphere expands in deep veins of color, in celestial images, in gestures and transfiguration that release the imagination (...), and again the ritual essence, the myths of fertility, the telluric incarnations, the overflowing and vital presence of nature, "says the writer Salvador Garmendia. [7]

To flow and flow again, to transform and persist are the eternal waves in his painting. Matter, full in density, disappears little by little in the latter stage of his artistic life in Mérida, setting up a flat color, and so, this undercurrent that drags behind the awned lines of geometry emerges in rigorous structures, reflection of an isolation and a voluntary retreat that is the daily life in the artist. A coincidence relationship with his 1952 year painting is established, perhaps because of the marked geometry of the main character of his paintings, which presents forms of a liturgical and allegorical tradition. This new synthesis is the basis for some of his upholstery projects that Vigas will later undertake.

Traveling, moving from one place to another, have been highly dynamic issues in the painting for Oswaldo Vigas, maybe that's why his return to Caracas in 1969 marks a new experience of freedom: the forms expand, the strokes open and despite the paint is still diluted on the fabric, the figure becomes more concrete. By the year 1973 a color detachment begins to occur, ending up on basic grays and whites figures burned by the striping by salt called "Ladies" and "Fripones".

It is in the vertigo that the work of Vigas can be condensed in a way that the need to concrete ideas, as soon as possible, leads him to paint acrylics in a small format, enriching the thematic, and so, when between 1976 and 1977 he faces the challenge of large format, he can perform it with the drive and force required. The poet Juan Calzadilla said:  "The process of painting wants to escape itself 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, they require strong impulses that make the gestures come into play. Hence, these impulses are followed by meditation, by changing formats through a scale that goes from the extremely reduced proportions of the painting, to the dimensions of mural works. In this projection, each issue or set of issues takes place in a serial form, until they are used completely. A series where white intonation predominates is followed by one in which the dominant color is yellow ocher or blue. The world of Vigas opens its front doors to a forest where the trees and the sound foliage begin to take an amazing consistency. We pass quickly from the detail to the overall picture plane, in relation to which, the picture becomes a trimmed fragment.“ [8]

It is impossible to dive into the painting of Oswaldo Vigas without feeling like you're swimming in the American crossbreed waters. All currents, all searches are in constant review, asserting and contradicting themselves at the same time. We must also mention the wisdom, that when is boiling on the surface, can be violent or peaceful with no apparent reason, but which in the background is ignited with the truths of being. From the asceticism to the baroque and from the baroque to the synthesis: this law of "The Ancestors" asks to be fulfilled, with the vehemence that characterizes it. "An art in which the spirit plays a major role is not necessarily cerebral," says Pierre Reverdy. [9]

Poetry made by constant brushstrokes, the work of Vigas is a reality of elementary rites, of dark gods.

March, 1979.

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