About the dark gods
Roberto Guevara
El Nacional
Caracas, Venezuela. 1993
For Oswaldo Vigas, the fusions and alliances between cultures have always been the immediate consequence of the existence, and not a discovery prompted by the museums of anthropology or by art. Vigas is born in the mestizo America, conformed by generating cores of continuous processes, a frantic form of creation, which knows no pauses, because its main purpose is change and metamorphosis. For him, reality can only be conceived within the genesis.
The America that corresponds is therefore a trigger that is linked to both the utopias of new worlds, as to the visceral connection with the archetypes deeply sunken in the tides that precede us. His work corresponds with the passionate format, dominated by the drastic solutions, the mutations and the changes that are resolved in the dialectic of opposites. Therefore, the languages that he has employed throughout his vast experience, can overcome his own limits, always being more than themselves. So, for example, the informal abstraction that dominates a period of his work is also organic and very close to the great pulses of the earth. In turn, the exceeded figuration reaches a splicer dynamic that favors the meeting of the antipodes, and the integrative reconciliation.
The work of Vigas is consolidated during the postwar period. It's that time of extraordinary vivacity, where many outbreaks struggle to find a space and a worthy truthfulness. Such is the case of the radical disagreement of the Cobra group, with which the painter’s language has remarkable affinities, especially in the shared desire to overcome, even in an ethically manner, the aesthetic processes that had been announced with a fierce rejection to conformity and to the foreseeable by modernism. In both cases, new proposals and new attitudes in art that can bring the creators closer to the drama and to the abyss of man, as has been reiterated in a cruel way by the recent bloody holocausts are sought.
Since the late 40s, Vigas is already driving his strokes with a manifest spirit of violence, taking advantage of the powers of gestures and his own ancient claims in the form of familiar demons, the same forces that every day, one way or another are part of the support for our steps and our actions. At that time, relentless motivations follow and alternate each other like the one that drives him to strip the stroke and to become more basic in order to search for the elemental architectures of language. It is also a way to make easier the alliance between the vastness of signs and archetypes that arise in his work, those presences deeply sunken in the blood.
In this order of events, the overwhelming series of The Witches appear, one of which in 1951 received the National Prize for Painting in Venezuela. The witches relate to profound archetypes where prodigies of magic and enchantment join with the connotations of that universe of telluric scale that is femininity, while being the perpetual source of life. From these works on, in the work of Vigas occurs the great mixture of the psychic and spiritual origin that comes from African and pre-Columbian sources with contemporary currents that in the decades of the 50’s and the 60’s seek to evolve with independence and a rescue will of the new constituent bases of communication.
At this decisive moment, the Witches emerge as the great guide, hereinafter, for a work that will allow the richness of evolution, the power to turn into new directions and at the same time return to the source, the generator core. Vigas is a restless creator who takes advantage of the instinct as a survival condition and accepts the risk and rigor to evolve. In this sense, few works of American artists like his have followed a coherent, consistent, and clear but at the same time giddy process. The Witches, who really are the big American goddesses of nature, the telluric magma, act as centers of creative energy, with the ability to record the changes of the open process in the painting of Vigas.
And what happens is astonishing. All these enigmatic and dazzling presences that start to be organized in the course of two or three years, address previously unexplored possibilities one after another. He first goes to bigger and spacious structures, using entities and symbolic animals like in Alacrán, 1952 (Scorpion, 1952), or using natural and cultural contexts Yare, 1952. He then passes into more gradually severe orders, and even the color changes into darkened tonalities of apparent solemnity, that can be very well observed in the large mural of the Ciudad Universitaria (UCV, Caracas, 1953), deployed with sidereal rhythms that correspond with others at the organic levels in no allusive forms, but never disconnected from nature.
There are still new paths to take in order to reach an extreme step of simplification, when the shapes of Vigas become closed, dull, and elementary, as abstract and strange spores, as if they were the final step in the internationalization of the natural. From the glare and lit up colors, the exorcisms of the witches and animals of the underworld, to the drastic, severe, next to silence synthesis, a whole cycle has been covered and remains virtually closed. To go even forward would cause a new explosion.
The Paris period -a decade that started in 1954- corresponds to the outbreak. The push of a subdued matter reduced to its barest form, will be observed in oils that proclaim the liberation. Matter, textualism and gestures come into the scene with full powers and allow the display of each fabric as a collapse or an epiphany. In this decade, the figure debates itself to excel or to melt with this shining matter, in becoming, something that it is already, the great character. There is a powerful reason: the matter has been liberated.
Essentially, this process of material roll over and discovering is necessary to recover in the polarity, the figures related to great archetypes, that reappear in the next step, when he returns to Venezuela, and that will allow the artist to recreate his great themes, the powerful influence of the realms. Within this stage, some surprising modulations occur. From the raw, live colors, to the sparse tones. From the organic stroke to the decantation and debugging.
Finally, there are conciliations, handling of a free will that lead us to a present where the wisdom of risk, the mastery of the stroke accumulated in many diversifications, in a new and secure footprint seems to be established. Los pájaros de la paz (Birds of Peace) (1990) with its aerial structure, the same as in The Libertador (Liberator) (1984), alternates with faithful themes like Animal de costumbre (1977) and others that are incorporated, like the works of the Crucifixiones (Crucifixions) series (starting in 1990), one of which won the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo.
Vigas was right to accept once and for all his dark gods, the devastating suns which are also the birth of other eras, the demons and the usual animals of everyday domain, in which the echoes of the past persist. America gave him the opportunity to reciprocate his work with the scale of history, of a continent, of a feat.