Marta Traba: “The Lineage of the Holdouts” El Comercio, Lima, Perú; September, 1977

Oswaldo Vigas has assembled a meticulous retrospective that encompasses thirty years of his work as a painter.

A serious and thoughtful man who has been developing and thinking of these paintings as a coherent body of work, Vigas belongs to a remarkable contemporary lineage that might be described in Spanish as “los quedados”—for which there is no precise English equivalent. The adjective “quedado” can mean “left behind” or “has-been,” but in the case of Vigas and many other important Latin American artists, I use the word to describe “holdouts”-- those with the self-granted freedom to reject changes in personal identity that can result from investigating fashionable points of view and other outside influences. These influences inevitably apply the pressure of contemporaneity. Staying free of such influences corresponds with both the intention to express personal experience and the belief that such experience expresses the inescapable reality of a national or continental spirit that is apart from European or North American culture.

Therefore, on one hand, the holdouts reject the idea that the momentum of contemporary art must rival the “forward motion” of technology and science in highly industrialized countries; on the other, they also reject competition among pseudo-artistic products of the mass media which threaten to transform the artistic task into simply one more unremarkable activity of a consumer society.

These two rejections instantly transform the holdouts into archaic individuals, outside of the present time and place, at least from the perspective of the dominant avant-gardes. “The present" is not necessarily synonymous with conventional notions of time and place, and “los quedados” prefer to retain a notion of "time” without the inevitable marginalization of an episodic and frustrating “now” and “today,” and a notion of “place” without the despotic sense of “actuality.” And they embrace these notions even as they are called peasants, accused of being reluctant to accept a hypothetical universalism.

It is in this context of choices-- which are so important today, when many choose to swim with the sad current of decay and ad-libbing supported by magazines, galleries and museums around the world-- that we must see the work of Oswaldo Vigas.

How does an artist express himself within this framework? A concern with composition and the transmission of strong feelings and emotions seem to govern Vigas’ work.

Regarding the former, Vigas acts as a careful and observant artist, attentive to European abstract and Expressionist formulations from which he derived a profitable lesson. However, his work does not show signs of any particular influence, but prefers to move in the higher orbit of expressive freedom in which shapes and colors are emphasized to build a dynamic and emotional whole. Alternatively, and in a very logical and cyclical way, Vigas’ compositions have undergone orderly development, marked by a clear geometrical tendency applied over specific unbalanced areas, and a tight selection of colors has accompanied the development. Choices of tonal sets have been followed by strident periods, and then by dark moments in which color and light withdraw. The various states are always resolved within each painting, except for a brief period when the artist, in line with Venezuelan painting of the time, literally tackles the experience of informalism.

Thus described, Vigas’s work might seem dominated by a formal spirit existing above the will to signify, as well as by a strong work ethic that leads the artist to the daily, tireless task of painting. If it’s true that Vigas has, more than most, faith in the profession of painting, it should be noted that he’s both wary of the results of his formalist quest and unambiguously interested in communicating. While formalism implies conclusive acts that are ends in themselves and disregard broadcast as a relationship with the public, Vigas’ painting is performed in constant vigilance with respect to the trilogy of artist, media, and audience.

Sometimes this yearning becomes visible and apparent at the level of visions, of purely Venezuelan imaginative territory, transferred into potent synthesis, luminous and chromatic; or into the great domain of witches, where Vigas ventures into a national substratum traversed by superstitions and magic formulas. Sometimes the message is more complex and immediate, when Vigas resolves material and formal issues in which order or disorder is inscribed: the happiest of these cases are those in which Vigas lets loose and amplifies the organic violence of forms that conform with his emotional improvisation.

Vigas’ work is atypical within the mainstream of the Venezuelan plastic imagination, which was deeply tied to experiment and novelty, and affiliated with technology and kineticism. Vigas never was attracted by such currents, which in some way represent an “official” Venezuelan art, and which determined Venezuela’s artistic image in the international arena.

Against the notion of advancement proposed by these trends, Vigas has stubbornly adhered to the notion of self-development within an authentic and harmonious life of forms that cannot be separated from the particular destiny of each artist. Thus every period of Vigas’ work emerges from the previous one through a formal and expressive need that, in turn, serves as a platform for what follows. Between periods, though, there is no linear progression, no simple going-forward; rather, Vigas often retraces his steps and revisits an attitude or a subject from new points of view, in accord with fresh experience.

This is why the work of Vigas, like a human body, has feet, a torso, and a head, and develops and matures they way the body does. It’s a body the belongs to a normal professional. Like any normal being, it has likes, desires, and a particular vocation, but no obsessions. It tries to reconcile rather than to break. Its conflicts are brief; they are never really dramatic and result in new fraternal situations.

Vigas’ work is governed by a healthy spirit, strong visual honesty, and the generous idea of imbuing the plastic materials he uses with warmth and feeling. Vigas manages to achieve this purpose throughout his work, while determined always to be sensitive and vibrant.