Vigas Constructivista. París. 1953 – 1957
Ascaso Gallery, Miami, U.S.
November 2012 – February 2013

Vigas constructivista
Bélgica Rodríguez

Since he started out as an artist, Oswaldo Vigas has thought about abstractions, rather than images as such. These abstractions do not seek aesthetic justifications beyond themselves. Rather, they ore self-contained artistic expressions that dialogue with artistic and historical concepts in tune with explicitly aesthetic concerns which -when considered from the formalist critical approach that is so condemned today- situate his work as a unique expressive, representative and organic form of visual writing. In this sense, Vigas' work cannot be reduced to a simple schema of abstraction. It is much more complex than that, since it has developed in line with multiple factors: instinctive perception, knowledge of the rules of painting, and in response to the context the artist's practice exists within.

The decade of the fifties signaled a change in the life and work of this prolific Venezuelan artist. In 1952 he travelled to Paris, excited by the three prizes he had been awarded in the Salón Oficial Anual de Arte and by the success of his first retrospective show at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, the most important in Venezuela, which covered ten years of what would become a successful career as an artist. In Paris, a mecca for international artists at the start of the twentieth century, Vigas encountered a dynamic, active and cosmopolitan scene bubbling over with experimentation and the quest to develop new approaches to art. There, Vigas discovered Picasso, his Cubism and many other trends, and created a new framework for his work by adapting abstract and Constructivist trends that he would channel into figurative and abstract works for which his signature style still provided an identifiable substratum. In his series Objetos negros (Black Objects), Formas tensionales (Tense Forms) and Proyectos para murales (Projects for Murals) his abstract and geometric style took on a more radical form; however, it was not rigid but instead was infused with highly charged emotions. In 1953, Vigas enrolled at Marcel Jaudon's engraving and lithography workshop at the École de Beaux Arts in the French capital, which influenced the importance he gave to paper in much of his painting. He also took courses in Art History at La Sorbonne University and these tools enable him to deploy new approaches to his practice that generated several groups of works encompassing his exploration of new concepts, different to the ones he had worked on previously and that characterized his 1952 retrospective.

This change in theme and concept also stimulated an inquiry into space in painting and other formats, which can been seen in the geometric series Proyectos para murales, which he made for the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas (Caracas University City). This project clearly affected the new route the artist took and led him to abandon his figurative style. It should be added that that Vigas' interest in geometry had emerged at the start of the fifties when he was still in Venezuela, as can be seen in paintings such as Yare, La red (The Grid, 1952) and Figura (Figure, 1953), and even in works he made when still a student. In the midst of the creative explosions that shifted his work toward a geometric style, Vigas also worked on semi-figurative or semi-abstract paintings like Muchacha del abanico (Girl with Fan, 1950), up until Gran Bruja (Big Witch, 1951).

Once he reached Paris, and without wasting any time, Vigas became acquainted with artists who had their own styles of abstract geometric art, including Jean Dewasne, Victor Vasarely, August Herbin and Fernand Léger; the Latin American artists Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta; and the sculptors Antoine Pevsner, Baltazar Lobo, Jean Arp, Robert Jacobsen and Henry Laurens, who were all prominent figures in the city's cultural scene at that time. This period spans three intense years (1953-56 approximately). It is important to recall the peak of interest in geometric abstract art in Venezuela during the fifties, when many artists sought out conceptual and universal themes as the only way to free the nation's painting from the hegemony of landscape painting by working with ideas that could only be expressed through geometric abstract art. This was the time of the Taller Libre de Arte in Caracas (Free Art Workshop), which questioned Venezuelan art and promoted a more universal approach. In 1957 Vigas returned to Venezuela during the zenith of abstract art, but he did not submit to local trends and continued to follow his own path.

Every rupture brings the resurrection of "something" unique with it, but this "something" is necessarily related to previous production and bears the traces of the foundations that help generate new visual and conceptual platforms, on both a plastic and aesthetic level.

Vigas researches, enquires, rummages, and studies here and there, and, as Carlos Silva would say, he is both author and subject; in my opinion, Vigas has created a theme where he endeavors to reinsert certain values into art by tracing the mysteries of ancient and modern man's spirits, which constantly appear in his work. During the first half of the fifties, Vigas made abstract cryptograph-like images produced by combining a Modernist attitude to art that came from the international art context, with a profound and planetary spirituality linked to mysticism and religion, which can be seen in works such as Personaje naciente I (Character Being Born I), Composición (Composition) and Selva y espíritu (Jungle and Spirit) (1953). This does not mean that he was channeling the mysteries of the Venezuelan and Latin American pre-Hispanic creative spirit, but rather that he delved into and reached the unfathomable archetypes of mythology to discover phenomena that normal people do not necessarily see in order to create solid, infinite forms in time and space: forms that are, in other words, eternal. Each work from the three series in this period (that are included in this exhibition) is based on a network of thick or fine lines: lines that contain color and conceal invisible, systematic drawings of secret figures -a subtle inheritance of Piet Mondrian's metaphysical transcendentalism that endured in new generations of abstract, geometric or organic artists. Resonating with the Cubist echoes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Constructivism of the Russian dissidents, Kasimir Malevich's Suprematism, Piet Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism and the magical collages of Jean Arp, these artists worked to create unique plastic architectures based on geometric abstract art. The work Oswaldo Vigas made between 1953 and 1956 is located in this setting, where for three years he painted the series Proyectos para murales, Objetos and Formas tensionales.

In his abstract geometric series, Vigas reduces figurative forms to formality and symbols without making them seem mechanical. On the contrary, he fills them with intimate emotion and tension through dense brushstrokes and color, or lack of it, and does not reveal exactly what natural or human object is being presented. One might consider the titles selected and the works they prefigure are metaphorical, symbolic or even ironic, for irony is a constant element of Vigas' strong character both as man and artist. In analyzing Vigas' work - and in the way the series in this exhibition are ordered - it is important to highlight the organic associations that seem to communicate emotions inspired "by the soul”.

The communication between these series and the spectator generates a sensorial experience based on the works relation to the physical world and the cosmos, especially in the case of the Objetos, which emphasize a metaphysical belief in non-representational painting, both in the artist's own, emblematic imaginary and in the world around him. Vigas makes a radical arrival at a new formal structure by fracturing the image and continually transforming the concepts at work in his practice. Abstract geometric painting is not a hiatus in Oswaldo Vigas' life as an artist, but rather is the result of ten years of thinking about art.

The invitation he received from architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva to take part in the Integration of the Arts project at the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) was the catalyst that led Vigas to geometry.

He made many sketches for the project that now form the series Proyectos para murales, several of which were integrated into the facades of some important buildings on the campus, such as the Plaza del Rectorado. Two mural sized works were made in Venetian mosaic and their highly structured compositions accentuate the geometric relationships between lines and horizontal and vertical planes.

Other illustrative works are Proyecto para mural en verde (Project for Green Mural) and Proyecto para mural naranja (Project for Orange Mural), which, despite the fact they were never built, nevertheless stand alone as art works because they reveal the maximum simplicity of form in the figures the artist was working on during the same decade.

For instance, if one inverts the murals to make them vertical instead of horizontal, they clearly resemble a stylized form of figuration and one can even identify figurative references in the geometric forms.

In Proyectos para murales, Vigas explores the visual grammar of the rhythmical contrasts created by the interplay of horizontal and vertical lines. The contrast of horizontal lines and forms, which are sometimes intersected to make the surface of the painting more dynamic, produces the work's overall unity through planes of specific colors confined to geometric compartments that are almost always set off by a white background.

This geometric structure means the work moves away from thematic specificity to approach systematic and minimalist work that demonstrates a profound intellectual sensibility. The artist appropriates elements from Cubism and Constructivism to structure his mural proposals and thus emphasizes triangular planes, underlined brushstrokes that symbolically evokes a strange nature, both human and natural.

The monumental scale of these projects is obvious even in the format of projects and can be appreciated clearly once they have been installed on the surface of the large wall.

In his Proyectos para murales Vigas frees color from being representational and he approaches it as a sort of planimetric painting that leads to a suggested image of reality. His architectural patterns mix painting with a stridently linear architecture, whose colors are a ways controlled by the web of lines, brushstrokes and geometric figures. The series Formas tensionales (Tension Forms), carried out in 1955 and 1956, has compositions that are structured from intercepting different sized, organic round and oval geometric forms that combine with straight angled lines. In Formas tensionales I and Formas tensionales II (1955), an element resembling a face appears in the foreground of the Cubist-style composition. In this series, Oswaldo Vigas establishes a somewhat sui generis category of abstraction because while he no longer represents objects, they still reside deep within the structure. By consequence, the works stop being a manifestation of the figurative and instead are manifestations of the abstract, in a dialectics of plastic and thematic elements. Vigas' iconography has given way to the absent image that is centered within the interplay of lines, where the content tends more toward Platonism, into which Vigas' complex universe is most forcefully decanted.

This work emerges from dualisms that are organized into symmetries and asymmetries, in straight and oblique lines. This series differs from the Objetos negros because it contains reconstructions of symmetry when form breaks into a kaleidoscopic prism whose colors vary according to their rotation on the pictorial plane.

In 1954 Vigas began the series entitled Objetos that continued until 1956 and spanned almost the entire length of his abstract-geometric period. Towards the end of 1956, he made a painting that although abstract in nature, continues to retain the organic structure in its forms while exploiting the visual and plastic force of his black lines to the maximum. The paintings from this period stand out by virtue of their outstanding pictorial quality: "deformed" figures in splintered black, counter-positions in negative and positive space, form and background, and a meaning that, in not representing visible reality, resemble similar to the spirituality of Piet Mondrian's Neo-Plasticist painting. In the Objetos negros Oswaldo Vigas uses free, almost expressionist, lines that make form, and thus theme, disintegrate; this could be explained in theosophical terms in that he attempts to ward off reality and situate it behind the image the viewer is confronted with. This can be seen in Objeto vegetal americano (American Vegetable Object) and in Objeto paisaje ciudad (City Landscape Object, both from 1954), along with Objeto paisaje (color) (Landscape Object color) and Objeto pastel II (Pastel Object II, both from 1955), before reaching Objeto negro (Black Object), Objeto negro Americano en tres bloques (American Black Object in three blocks) and Objeto americano abierto (Open American Object, all from 1956). To borrow Mondrian's axiom, according to which "(...) clarity of thought must be accompanied by clarity of technique", in some cases non-colors, the black and white of the surface, and in other cases color, create a pure structure designed for aesthetic contemplation, which forms the characteristic bi-chromatic style of the Objetos negros series, of which Objeto negro (1956) could serve as an example.

The analysis of this period of Oswaldo Vigas' work leads to the conclusion that, just like the European geometric artists from the 1930s, in the fifties our artist explored abstraction by creating schematic figurative forms, by studying and analyzing different circular, ova, square, rectangular forms, bars, lines and flat and sometimes texturized color, which had already appeared in his formative years.

One constant feature of his work has been his use of titles that suggest figurative art. Even when he names a mainly black and white, but sometimes broadside and low temperature colored geometric, series "object", this name implies a reference to the real world. This also occurs in his Formas tensionales, which contain figurative elements that are concealed by deconstructing form. These series by Vigas mark a rupture from what was already considered a conventional and traditional form of abstract art. For instance, he does not separate himself from nature, but instead studies and analyzes its organic properties to translate them into a magnetic field of bold black brushstrokes that have Expressionist features and renounce all perspective. Nonrepresentational form resides in the brushstrokes, the color, black and others, that sublime y produce minimalist works. Their basic syntax is based on the dynamic interplay between colors —even when it is only with black- that emphasizes the universal beauty of abstract forms.

From 1956 onwards, one figure appears in the works Personaje vegetal (Vegetable Person, 1957) due to the fact that the artist has not totally abandoned his attraction to the human body. This painting combines abstract and figurative elements, working with sensual round forms and bright colors. Vigas moved at great speed through different stages of his work. At the start of the sixties he took an interest in Informalist art and shortly afterwards he produced a series of Informalist works. This trend exploded onto Venezuela's art scene and was adopted enthusiastically by a significant group of artists due to its iconoclastic and irreverent attitude, but mainly because it was staunchly opposed to figurative art and, in particular, to abstract geometric art.

In any case, none of the Vigas' series is disconnected from the real world where his soul dwelled. A world transformed into line, color and space that resulted in boldly expressive images created by brushstrokes that created abstract forms whose meaning can only be gauged by sensitivity, and which is based on basic, universal values and sensorial experiences that are the product of intense intellectual processes.

Caracas, September 2012

Monumental Works

These three murals by Oswaldo Vigas represent an important moment in international art. Situated in the Plaza del Rectorado in the Universidad Central de Venezuela, they were part of the Integration of the Arts Project by architect Carlos Raul Villanueva, in which a number of Venezuelan and international artists participated, such as Fernand Leger, Victor Vasarely, Jean Arp, Antoine Pevsner, Baltazar Lobo and Alexander Calder, among others. Made in Venetian mosaic, the murals were made in Paris in the Gaudin Brothers studios. The Universidad Central de Venezuela was declared a World Heritage Site on November 30, 2000.

The Trilogies pare Banesco mural emerged after the revival of some early pieces made by Vigas in the 50s when he was living in Paris and that were part of the group of works he designed for the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. Given its position and large size, the mural is visible from different points in the city and has thus become a new reference in Caracas' cityscape.