"I try to understand the tragic condition of humankind, for having chosen the wrong path. For me, painting comes to heal the wound that reminds us the paths we have lost, which we temporarily recover through artistic emotion..." (Oswaldo Vigas)

Art fills every moment of Oswaldo Vigas' life. It contains some of the dimensions that reveal his multiple sources of inspiration, among which are his love for conversation, music, reading, and cooking. Among these activities, spontaneous sketches emerge in his imagination that, in the future, will become works that will be subjected to his critical gaze for days, weeks, and sometimes years. Some paintings are lucky enough to flow more easily than others; when the artist paints the charcoal drawing on the bare canvas, he intuits the difficulty he will find in reaching one of the most difficult stages of any creator: knowing when the work is finished.

“My ideal would be for that spontaneous work of the sketch to already have the definitive proportions of the paintings, so that I would not have to intervene rationally, which inevitably tries to impose itself and often betrays us.” (Oswaldo Vigas)

Each piece is born from sketches that Vigas constantly creates. It is common to see the fluency with which the artist creates them on any support he has at hand, from paper cup holders to a napkin. Many of them are colored at birth and, when they are, as Vigas would say, "they are no longer so on the tightrope." Which is not the case with sketches that are only lines, as they would still be on the edge of the knife.

This way of finding what is sought has a certain parallelism with the Platonic philosophy of ideas, which would be translated into his plastic language in his sketches. Although we could say that Socrates' maieutics managed, with his constant questions about the seemingly obvious, to give birth to truths. Vigas gives birth to forms inspired by his creative mythology, which he has been materializing for decades.

“Every day I am more convinced that the most important acquisition in contemporary art is to open the way to the archaic past, when one enters one of those prehistoric caves and begins to run his hands over the walls of the cave and to revive those graffiti that are scratched on the rock, one goes back thousands of years and that is present and not past. In each pictorial gesture it is a repetition of an archaic act, because that is prior to spoken language, the hand knows more than reason." (Oswaldo Vigas)

For the painter, the search for the ancestral is an eternal present, another of the fundamental sources that nourish his work. This dimension has strong symbolic charges, hence the variety and breadth of his taste, which includes pre-Hispanic art, popular art, Mayan art, Inca art, and his special predilection for African art, which coexist in his conception of taste without any contradiction with oriental art, and the most varied trends of modern and contemporary art. To enter his visual discourse it is useful to keep in mind this universality and eclecticism of his culture, since from it emerge the seeds from which his paintings, sculptures, ceramics and jewels are born that provoke almost a spell that traps the neophyte spectator and delights the connoisseur in the museums and galleries of the world, where his work has been presented.

This aesthetic impact stems from a delicate balance between his intellectual and spiritual freedom, between the rational and the irrational, aspects present in each and every one of his pieces; later when he won the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1952 with La Gran Bruja, he will renew the life of our intellectual and artistic world. Thus, in a provocative way, he began to occupy a central place in national art, hiding the cultural and intellectual world of that moment. The Witches are rooted in the visual investigation of the archeology of the center of Venezuela, recreated in a personal language. This being the decade that Venezuela lived under the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948-1958), with a repressive control over all Venezuelan society, however, this could not prevent the enriching controversy between trends and characters of the height of Miguel Otero Silva, who was one of his defenders against his detractors.

There was such an uneasiness in the artist to find his roots that, in the fifties, he entered La Guajira, where he found a dimension still ignored in Latin American art: the facial and textile designs of the Wayuu culture, characterized by subtle geometric structures. This interest is typical of a generation and a continent that was searching for its cultural and spiritual essence. And, as a reaction to this, in the fifties, in our plastic arts, Oswaldo Vigas, Mario Abreu, Alirio Oramas, Guillermo Meneses, Juan Liscano and Alejo Carpentier gathered around the Taller Libre de Arte de Caracas. In other parts of the continent, such as Mexico, the works of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo were in their splendor; in Ecuador, the figuration of Oswaldo Guayasamín expanded; Alejandro Obregón in Colombia; in Peru we find Fernando de Szyszlo and, in Brazil, the muralism of Cándido Portinari dazzles. The work of Oswaldo Vigas occupies a fundamental place in this Latin Americanist movement that, in Venezuela, was almost overshadowed at that time by kineticism and by the ideological tendencies that underlay this movement.

The plastic language of Vigas, continues this process in his work of 2005 and 2006, however, we could affirm that in these years there is a chromatic inversion in his pictorial language by accentuating the relationship between the drawing and the chromatic, where the line, like an abyss, vigorously delimits the inside from the outside, as an expressive metaphor of the dualities of existence. Both in the background and inside the forms, the grays or the raw canvas, which dominated in previous periods, disappear, to give life to greens and yellows, colors typical of the tropics; it is the hustle and bustle of life that characterizes the Caribbean culture, which is made present.

Characters are born, dominated by a line that creates tension with the bare canvas and, as the spots are born, atmospheres begin to emerge that have a musical sense due to the harmonies developed. Each of these paintings has its own universe, with emotional charges transmitted by the artist when materializing his visual language.

The line has a chromatic character and, therefore, not only delimits, but also assumes different depths in its isolation. These strokes have unpredictable features due to their rhythm; thus, in Totémica, 2006; the stroke remains firm along the motley bodies and in a vertical direction, surrounded by a green background that contrasts with the red of the openings of the faces, which are transformed into surprising visual centers. These small red spots have such a presence in this entanglement of beings that they become fissures that filter life; and it is in these openings where the interiority of the being emerges; these bodies are full of textures that accentuate their expressiveness.

Several of the paintings created by Vigas, between the end of 2005 and 2006, have totemic features and a figuration that seeks ascension; these characters become a cosmic navel that seeks to reconstruct a visual synthesis that projects the paradoxes that grip humanity in the new millennium, when it has lost certainty in the bases of its conception of progress and development. This is perceived in these paintings when the deconstruction and rupture of the characters typical of this pictorial imagery are dominated by a gravitational movement that concentrates them on themselves.

The last decade of Venezuela is also characterized by a process of defragmentation and by the management of simplifying dualisms that deny common sense as a guide to action; these are features that are also present in this figuration since his drawings of the nineties, as evidenced in the series of characters where the organs are exchanged, where the parts of the body, in addition to being deformed, are resignified. Thus, we are faced with characters whose faces are dominated by the phallic, a medium through which the artist poses a humanity dominated and manipulated by the sexual. This trend is accentuated in his figuration with the arrival of the new millennium. These beings dominated by inversion create dramatic situations where it is possible to find mouths in the shape of a vagina, phallic noses, buttocks instead of a brain. These resources confront the viewer with a striking beauty that creates a visual discourse that reveals the artist's inner vision of humanity.

The triangle, the crescent moon, fire, verticality and horizontality are also present in several of these works that transform these inorganic forms into organic ones, which seem to be related to the geometry of Paracas Inca art, as expressed in the wings of some birds of these textile designs formed by triangles and feathers.

Other paintings are characterized by their free forms and playful deformation, as is the case with Criatura Mítica II, 2006; they are perceived by the viewer as a spot to which meaning is transmitted by projecting the external dimension into the internal one. Among the pieces dominated by strong colors, Desnudos Ornamentales, 2004 stands out; where he mixes the human and the animal in a personal and organic geometry.

We are facing a plastic language that creates a bridge between the different perceptive levels of reality and that seeks an increasingly deep understanding of our soul. And so, it challenges the viewer to investigate these primordial forms so that they reveal their secrets, which is why it is not enough to just see them in passing, but it is necessary to look at them carefully. This peculiarity of the artist is linked to his passion for the symbolic; that is why in his plastic arts each piece is a formal whirlwind in which a figuration that seeks multiplicity and denies uniqueness is present. To do this, he moves away from reality in his themes, to create his own visual paradigms, which are a contribution to the history of Venezuelan plastic arts. An example is the theme of the eternal feminine in his work, his zoology and the anthropomorphic characters, motives that are made with the certainty that man is above all a creator; hence that passion for cave art, for being the first pictorial manifestation of humanity.

In the horizontal, landscape paintings, Vigas avoids isolated figures by creating conglomerates of beings of various types, coherent with his zoology and fantastic anthropomorphism, such as headless dogs, snakes that hide their forms, and human bodies recomposed in a symbolic anatomy that is reborn in each viewer to find themselves in it.

"Painting has made me more human, because I believe that the value of a human being is in direct proportion to what he can contribute to the discovery of the enigmas of being." (Oswaldo Vigas)

Eduardo Planchart Licea, 2024