Homage to History: Oswaldo Vigas at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá
By Sara Roffino
Blouin Art Info - Modern painters
U.S. August 15, 2015
The oeuvre of self-taught Venezuelan painter and sculptor Vigas reads like a 70-year history of modernism in Latin America. In dialogue with Roberto Matta, Rufino Tamayo, and Wifredo Lam, Vigas, who passed away in 2014, was a prolific artist in the modernist milieu of his time yet failed to receive acclaim on par with that of his contemporaries. A touring retrospective of his work, curated by writer, historian, and former director of the Art Museum of the Americas Bélgica Rodriguez, seeks to address this oversight, offering a small window into Vigas’s thousands of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and tapestries.
Throughout his childhood in the state of Carabobo, Vigas painted. And he continued to paint after enrolling in medical school—managing to exhibit and participate in the cultural life of Caracas while completing his studies. Shortly after graduation, he found himself the recipient of the National Fine Arts Prize, and within a year he left for Paris, where he lived in a hotel with many other Latin American artists in Saint Germain des Prés. After 12 years there, he returned to Caracas in the mid-1960s, by which point he was established in his role as an artist and embarked on his career within the city’s art institutions, serving as a director of the National Culture Institute, the National Culture Council, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Art Gallery. The result of Vigas’s expansive relationships is a varied body of work.
Influences of cubism, Expressionism, Constructivism, and Informalism are evident, portraying an artist consistently reconsidering established approaches to painting, and integrating them into his practice. Installed chronologically, the exhibition is a visual inventory tracing the relationships, movements, and thoughts with which Vigas engaged throughout his life. For example, the black-and-white Objeto series from the mid-’50s signifies an interest in Constructivism—a movement that had peaked and reached Latin America two decades earlier—but there’s a brushiness to the works that forces them into a negotiation with Informalism. In the ’60s, Vigas moved into a direct discourse with Abstract Expressionism in works like Plegaria and Bestiario, both 1963. Never adhering entirely to figuration or abstraction, or to any particular school of thought, Vigas’s later works employ elements of many. With Festejantes XVIII, 2010, and Pareja Sentimental, 2012, his palette is much brighter than before and his figures are clear, if abstracted.
In addition to Vigas’s multitude of interests, he, like many other Latin American artists of the 20th century, maintained a deep fascination with pre-Columbian iconography. His witches, or brujas—modernist depictions of the ancient Venus de Tacarigua figurine—are the works for which he is most widely recognized. Bruja Infante, 1951, stands as one such example, with strong black lines outlining the figure’s oblong head, extended neck, and torso, which is divided into long rectangles bisecting two uneven breasts. Paint is thin, and for the most part, color is reserved. Two exceptions to the sparse color are on the face—one an asymmetrical circular shape in carmine, the other a dusky green mouth—where the paint is thick enough to be cut through to the canvas with small abstract patterns of lines.
Many of Vigas’s works, from geometric pieces such as his Formas series, 1955–56, to much later paintings like Presencia Animal, 1999, can be seen in relation to tejidos Paracas, textiles woven nearly 2,000 years ago by Andean people to wrap bodies for protection in death. Genesis, a large painting from 1980, goes beyond referencing the tejidos. Its crimson tone the same as that of the textiles, the rough depiction of a bird, and its title clearly illustrate Vigas’s homage to history, an homage that in many way defines the modernist painting of South America. Through existing somewhere between the possibility and the impossibility of representation, Vigas’s Genesis also exists in that interstitial space between history and the present. It follows naturally that the Vigas Foundation is now working in a manner similar to that of the artist himself—striving to preserve and contextualize a historical legacy within a contemporary discourse that is itself an outgrowth of that history.