Americanism and archaic art in Oswaldo Vigas
Eduardo Planchart Licea
El Universal
Caracas, Venezuela. May, 1990
Oswaldo Vigas is an Americanist. By this we understand someone who digs and reflects what "being" Latin American in his work means. But what do we refer with “being”? America does not have a unique being, it has many essences. Therefore when we refer to Vigas’ Americanism, it is necessary to go to the deepest roots of our continent: the telluric, depicted in earthy hues of some of his works, which embody our land, our stones and our caves and are finally projected on the objects and its textures.
The American soil has a long geological history. Thus, each stone, however insignificant it may seem, each stalagmite, has in itself the imprint of a past that projects and recreates itself in the shapes and colors of its work. They are not born as a conscious search, but instead in a spontaneous way, the result of knowing how to listen to its inner voice and also the power to have known how to despise a whole realistic or naturalistic pictorial tradition. When Oswaldo Vigas takes up the theme of Americanism, he neither copies forms from reality nor tries to westernize our ethnicity.
Another level of Americanism in Vigas is expressed in his figuration and is clearly manifested in the witches (1952), archetypal representation of pre-Columbian mother goddesses. In the witches, the fertility organs are represented by breasts and an abstract pubic that encloses a triangular vagina. These forms that link the soil fertility with the fertility of women, the cyclical nature of the moon with the women’s biological cycles, have an archetypal image in the figuration of his witches.
They are a recreation inspired by our pre-Columbian statuettes, which Vigas met in 1950 thanks to an exhibition at the Museum of Natural Sciences, where the newly collection donated by Dr. Requena was shown. At that time he starts making his first sketches, which later will become his famous witches.
"I had seen the pre-Columbian art exhibition that Oramas Requena had donated to the Museum of Natural Sciences in 1950. Hence, the first notes that I did about pre-Columbian pottery. At that time I make a trip to the Guajira and was very impressed by the tattoos that the Indians made with rollers on their faces; they were polychrome paintings "(O. Vigas).
Some of these statues are reproduced in a book on pre-Hispanic art published by the Mendoza Foundation in Venezuela, where Female Figure # 58 was surely among those pieces.
The flattened faces of these statues did not represent fantastic creatures, but the aesthetic conception of our ancestors, and they often are nothing more than the tablets used to produce cranial deformations through which women sought to have a similar appearance to their deities, thus narrowing the link between the sacred and the profane. A mask specifically worked in the corporeity that echoed the obsession of the primitive man to live in mythical times and spaces.
These works are also characterized by vulva-shaped eyes that are signs of fertility that Oswaldo Vigas moved into his works. In other pieces of the same collection, the pregnant woman is represented with the vulvar eyes in a more open position, as they resemble the fertilized seed that opens up to give life to the new plant. The female hair on these statues is associated with vegetation.
Hence the ritual of violently ripping off their hair from the girls that start to be fertile, as there is a mystical empathy between them, and so it is expected that as the hair of the girl will grow, so will the vegetation. For this reason, some statuettes are hairless and lead us to understand the specific associations between women and the telluric. These small sculptures, like the witches, are germinal figures, a life symbol by excellence.
Vigas’ Americanism deepens in the archaic cultures, recreating and updating its presence by showing the continuity of our past in his figuration. A past that is also expressed today in the facial designs of the guajiros and which are reflected in the faces of the witches.
This archetypal figuration of Vigas is starkly shown in ladies who break the balanced figures of the witches, leaving behind their hieratic immobility, giving birth to living mythic forms of our popular religiosity, echoes of our collective soul which is crystallized in his work with La señora y el tapir (the Lady and the tapir) or Maria Lionza.
This pre-Columbian pottery, rather than being symbols of fertility and the center of propitiatory rituals, shows the conjunction of opposites, because, through its forms, it synthesizes the masculine and the feminine, the uronic and the telluric, the collective and the passive, Mu and Se. This is clearly shown in the elongated neck and the robust buttocks that characterize them, which undoubtedly have a double meaning, because they also represent a phallus and their flattened faces, a vagina, representing the responsible sexual conjunction of the miracle of life. In this context, the binding of organic counterparts involves a concept of totality that is the generator of the vital delicate balance of our planet. In later periods of the work of Vigas, this inquiring figuration of essences is reflected in the Ancestros (the Ancients) series, images that reminds us of African archaic gods that are characterized by elongated bodies and faces.
In addressing this issue we cannot ignore the Fripones, characters that are typical of the religiosity of the North American Indians, who have their parallel in our popular imagery in the liveliness and playfulness of Tío Conejo. The Fripones represent the sparky, ladino and cheater character of our population. Vigas thus shows his roots in our land, something that is still a reflection of our current Venezuela that is now in crisis by the excessive presence of the Fripones.