“What I am: an American man.” 
“The Americas is a cosmos.”

From “El pintor y su credo,” Estampas magazine #225 (El Universal), January 23, 1958, Caracas


“I have never been rigorously abstract nor rigorously figurative. What I have always tried to be is rigorously Oswaldo Vigas.”

From Carlos Díaz Sosa, “Oswaldo Vigas: Two Techniques, One Personality,” El Nacional, September 29, 1958, Caracas


“Our continent is full of dark signs and warnings. Telluric signs, magic, and exorcisms are deep components of our condition. At the same time that they reveal something; these symbols place us and compromise us in a disturbing, volitile world. Only a few South American painters have come close to deciphering this underworld. The intention of my painting is to reach these signs, interpret them, and translate these symbols into new warnings.”

Text written by the artist on the occasion of the exhibition of his “Venezuelan Witches” paintings at the Inter-American Development Bank, Washington D.C., May, 1967


“There are products of the imagination and the fantasy which are compromises between several worlds... Being plastically expressed, they create anxieties and longings that can’t be put into words… They may be called ‘ghosts,’ and they have something to do with the religious feeling to which angels and demons belong, as well…”

From A. Feltra, “Oswaldo Vigas: Despite the Success and Despite the Learnings,” El Universal, May 19, 1979, Caracas


“For a painter, working is a kind of compulsive exercise... Some bad paintings become eventually good, and vice versa. One must learn to wait because, apparently, this is an old man’s trade. The older you are, the more you realize that you have to give up the natural desire to be a ‘Good Painter’ to make good paintings. Using proper grammar is important only when you don’t have anything to say.”

From Alvaro Clemente, “Oswaldo Vigas, Magia y Color,” interview for Hombre de Mundo magazine, November 1979, Miami, Florida


“I currently try to keep a balance, a compromise between the initial impulse and the organizing [power of] reason. I make many spontaneous sketches that I complete almost automatically throughout the day… and when they are mature I put them into the fabric of a single session. At first, with a bit of premeditation, and then, as it progresses, more spontaneously—moving ahead several times from the starting point, but retaining something essential at the other end of the matter...”

Remarks made by the artist in conversation with critic Juan Calzadilla


“All these arrivals and departures make me sad. I do not like to arrive and I do not want to leave, either. What I want is to stay-- anywhere, but stay!”

Remarks made by the artist at the airport of Nice, France, July 12, 1991


“Archaic art needs to be revitalized, for it is the most vital part of contemporary art, and we need to relive it through what we must never lose: the child-like condition. We need to maintain, cultivate, and explore it, and through it find in the part of us that has never aged all the memories that belong to us. I said to myself, if I will live until I’m a hundred years old, I must do it without bonds. I therefore decided to paint as if I were a hundred: as a child.”

From the exhibition catalog, “Oswaldo Vigas, un hombre americano,” Casa de las Americas, Havana, Cuba, November-December, 1996


“Being able to paint and write at the same time is ideal. You paint with the right hand and write a poem with your left hand. The brushes act as keys to open the locks, so that the words escape from their cage.”

Oswaldo Vigas, Mis dioses tutelares (collection of poems), Medici Gallery Editions, October, 2007


“The future of my painting is obliged to conquer itself every day.”

From Juan Sánchez Peláez,“Mi amigo el pintor Oswaldo Vigas,” El Nacional, 1957, Caracas


“As an American painter I have one pictorial language of Western origin, but I am different from the European in that in America there was no classicism,so we are freer and younger. America is the now, there is no before. America is synthesis, it is the now and the future.”

From “El pintor y su credo,” Estampas magazine (El Universal), 1958, Caracas


“Rich or poor in life, all great artists are millionaires in eternity.” 

“The price of this painting by Van Gogh is not a crazy idea, nor a shame. On the contrary, it is a revenge of the genius of Arles and, with him, a revenge of all the enlightened ones who did not get any justice in life against the stupidities of the world.”

From Oswaldo Vigas, “La revancha de Vincent Van Gogh,” El Universal, 1987, Caracas


“There are two separate worlds in me. One is a world that handles words. I would call it ‘rational.’ The other handles the forms, which is completely irrational…”

Nilda Silva and Yecenia Medina, “Oswaldo Vigas: ‘Quiero llegar a ser niño,’” Caracas, 1997


“When you drink a glass of water, do you understand water? The most you can say is that it satisfies you to drink it, but you cannot say you understand it. It’s the same with the God of the Universe: you understand nothing. You can have an experience but you cannot understand it. Do you understand the scent of a flower? You smell it and feel it, it is part of the realm of sensations, but it has nothing to do with rationality-- that is, understanding.”

From “Dejando huellas - Oswaldo Vigas,” Torrecasa, 1998


“Every day I am more convinced that the most important asset of contemporary art is the opening of a path to the archaic past.”

From Eduardo Planchart Licea, interview with Oswaldo Vigas, Caracas, 2003


“For me, art is like life, and life is not pure; life has many nooks. Art is like that: one goes along a little path that goes over another, and you have to go that way. That’s a risk. I like taking risks, that is why I do not believe in anything that is pure. Purity is an alienation. The search for purity is a trap, a trap that leads to nothing, and art is not nothing. Art is everything. I believe in an art that gets into everything, in an art that transcends. Therefore, art cannot be pure, it must be contaminated as life is.”

From an interview with Lorenzo Vigas for the documentary film El vendedor de orquídeas (The Orchid Seller), 2016