Everyday wonder of Oswaldo Vigas
José Pulido
2001
Caracas, Venezuela. June 3rd, 2006
Jeanine hears the bell and responds "I'm coming!". Opens the door and pokes out with her yellow hair and encouraging smile. The first time that Master Braulio Salazar saw her, he said, "Hello, cocuiza hair" and so he kept calling her. Janine has perennially been the number one fan of Oswaldo Vigas. Since she married him, being a French girl, up to the present when the string of years lived in Venezuela has modeled her Venezuelan identity, she is tireless in the task of showing, protecting and promoting the work of her husband.
At once she takes advantage of the short walk and shows the sculptures of Oswaldo Vigas that are in the small courtyard, surrounded by the freshness of the garden. They are like bronze drawings sketched in the air. "This works is excellent! Isn’t it? What do you think? “
She is passionate about the conversation on the topic. Meanwhile, Oswaldo does not appear. Where is Oswaldo Vigas? The walls full of paintings and other objects in the room encompass its silence, it is like being in a cave: he is sitting in a corner, drawing on a notebook, almost squatting, with the concentration of a person that must complete the project that has been proposed for this day. He barely leaves the notebook on a table and stands up to say hello. He has just been cured from bronchitis and speaks as if he is unwilling to alter anything in the environment.
It is a narrow, vertical, thick notebook which contains the most recent sketches. In his file there are several dozens of these notebooks and there are also folders with drawings made on napkins, invitations, absorbent cardboard for placing cups and paper bags.
Vigas is the same vehement artist as he was when he had dark hair and jumped before a big picture, elucidating a work, wearing a beige safari that stained anyone at close range with all the colors. Now, with more years on his back, with age shaking his body and memories, he does the same when he is in front of the canvas and moves as if he has obtained energy of what he is up to, of the spontaneity that possesses him.
That magic
He draws and paints every day, without missing one. Being an artist, creator of bridges towards the lost magic dominated his existence. Just after he graduated as a doctor he devoted totally to art, with a such strong commitment towards painting that completely unbridled him away from medicine.
We already know: from the first time that he materialized a work until today, he has painted by putting his senses in the same fondness, deepening and advancing his proposal, even though he insists in clarifying that he has never been neither looking for anything nor investigating something: he has only created in the scope where he persists like a fish in water.
When I was twenty years old, he was one of the young friends who went to the atelier of Picasso in Paris. From that time he says he regrets not having shown his paintings to Picasso. "He told me several times to take my work to him and I never did it. It is that I was afraid that he could copy me." Oswaldo says this and laughs. Picasso absorbed everything and improved it, until it became Picasso.
-His work emerges with increasing force; do you feel you get better expressions today?
-It is not that the work is better, because it is eternal ...it is that I work on the archetypes that I have in my hand ... I feel that I have grasped them by the neck and I do not let them go... even though really, they were the ones that have grabbed me and do not let me go... everything I do is mixed, it emerges from there...
-What is it that the witches have become a kind of icon, a signature of yours? If someone mentions the name of Oswaldo Vigas, the term “and his witches” is automatically added.
-Because they are archetypes, they are figures that represent archetypes beyond aesthetics, beyond the merely pictorial. I did not know when I did them, but I know now. That happens when you mess up with the archetypes. The first witch I made was in the year fifty-one ... and that was after a trip to Paraguaipoa. I was looking for the source ... I had seen at the Science Museum the collection that old Oramas, Alirio Oramas’ father had left. The museum was run by Cruxent.
I had been working with the African, which was not proper to the African but with what I could find here in relation to this culture: the devils of Yare, the dances that were made in Rio Chico...
The ancestral
Magic, that primordial phase of human mentality is invoked by the archetypes. Everything man does is culture and history and ancestral figures and expressions of indigenous and African, where traces of magic and religion can be found, where an emotional beauty emerges. The men and women of primitive humanity told their dreams, fears, beliefs and existence through artistic expressions that invoked magical and religious answers. The innocence with which that infant humanity expressed its spirituality is a factor that Vigas recalls in his works, is a motivation that makes him invent the past and present, like a lost member of a tribe that only exists when a work is finished.
Vigas is the whole tribe together. He is the shaman who draws magical codes on the stone; he is also the maker of figures in clay, the weaver of baskets and hammocks. And at the same time he is the man who narrates, around the nocturnal fire, again and again, the origin of the universe and all the worlds.
He draws the creature in time, the man who does not make nature, but who performs it with primitive poetry. Oswaldo Vigas has recreated that always, trying to catch the sights and the magic inherent in all races. The witches become independent; they seem to own a message, a secret, they show mysterious frowns or smiles. They seem to know something that others ignored. They have come to life with a very old intention "(...) and that makes them unique, they are a floating tribe that occupies a soul space. The primitive is more mystical, it is the linking of a mystical participation. "
-I worked pre-Columbian figures, and linked them with the African. I never did a search; I acted rather reflecting a pattern of something archaically Venezuelan ... but I never stopped, I always kept continuing...
-You have also strive yourself to express eroticism in your own way.
-I have erotic prints, it is a big series ... my erotic engravings are almost unknown ... I tell myself that I do not care if no one have seen them, because someday they will.
-Your work has been more appreciated abroad, especially in France. What is the reason for that?
-One becomes part of the usual; part of something that is taken for granted... nobody pays any attention to an everyday wonder. In France I am a novelty, something that here I am not.
In the year 2003, in the Cannes Festival, they used one of your works for the poster, and La Monnaie de Paris Museum presented a retrospective of your work from 1952 to 1963 ... At that time you received the Order of Arts and Letters of France and the Vermeil Medal of the Ville de Paris ...
-The Work that was selected in Cannes I titled it La Bruja de la culebra (Witch of the snake). That piece was donated by Miguel Otero Silva to the Museum of Anzoategui ... Yes ... at the Museum of La Monnaie in Paris there was a multitude crowded in front of the door in the opening day. I was surprised. They had distributed huge posters in subway entrances and banners all over Paris ... People were waiting at the door because the Minister of Culture planned to say his speech before that crowd entered the museum, and when they opened, out of the blue, the place was filled up... the show lasted three months and was visited by thousands of people from Paris and from other parts of France…
-What different difficulty are you confronted with when you make sculptures?
-None. First I make a drawing and when I grab the clay, I work it as if I were drawing ... they come out normally ... what I do is put support to the sculptures ... many artists, when they make sculptures, see everything on a plane perspective... I see the three dimensions, that is the reason why my sculptures have a back ... they can be seen from behind ... I also make my paintings imagining that they have a back ...
-What is your great aspiration at this point?
-All I aspire is to continue painting and to have more time to sculpture ... what satisfies me is to keep doing what I do ... like if it was the first day of my life...