Idols and Characters
Carlos Silva
El Nacional
Caracas, Venezuela. November, 1984
It does not matter how acquainted we believe we are with the work of Oswaldo Vigas, every time the artist presents a set of creations in an exhibition, our perception is rewarded by the wonder of a profound art that is marked by authenticity.
This time, the Idols and Characters exhibition allows an approach perhaps not seen in previous occasions by the public and critics. That title is justly the initial key for winding the composite structures and messages, overt or underlying, disposed in significant levels that require a cumulative reading for its progressive enlightenment.
Within the persistence of that image, of this extensively and intensively worked iconography by Vigas “witches, gods, demons, animals, ancestors...” over the period of forty years, a fundamental distinction between two types of figures-contents that appear as two moments of the same creative process should be noted. Vigas ends up establishing from an early age, his expressive repertoire.
With a lucidity that scares “anticipating his own destiny”, in 1950 the artist already had the basic concentrated elements of his subsequent plastic speech and the passing of time of the plastic elements. Of course, it is not about the fact of being the owner at an early stage, of a kind of breviary or catechism of roughly schematic forms to be subsequently used, depending on the different opportunities. Of course not; Vigas has such an accused dramatic will, that he does not fall into the category of those painters that convert the forms into formulas. His manifested and confessed vitalism would have prevented him of using this kind of resource.
What Vigas acquires, filters and proposes from the beginning are the archetypes, the exemplary structures of his worldview. In other words, the basic guidelines that result from his interpretation of man and the American continent world. They are stark, decanted and essential visions: they are calligraphic frames of irreplaceable signs that constitute themselves as archetypes of successive forms. They are idols.
They are present both in the shaping of those "witches" thirty years ago, and in the ink drawings on sheets of paper that we can now admire. Vigas idols speak a universal, liturgical and eternal language because they were conceived as the essential linguistic frame of the artist, and in his enigmatic hieratic, they are beyond any circumstance and contingency.
And to increase the power of the message, Vigas placed his idols in a bold contrast, on top of the everyday most ever-changing means: the pages of classified ads. The persistence of the image, of the icon, of the idol, takes over the space and time, overcoming the swaying activity of the daily eagerness of life.
But from these idols-thoughts, particular forms with defined idiosyncrasies emerge; perfectly different climates and figures with their own load of emblems and heraldic. And by these means, the forms and personal beings, the characters, are born. Each character is unique, individual in its aspects and individual drama. They have their own significant space, reinforced by the variable symbology of each case. Two or three Vigas characters are figuratively different from each other but essentially identical because they are derived from the same idols.
The idols define the style of Vigas, and the characters, the concrete way to dynamically develop such style. So, Oswaldo Vigas is platonic? On one side, the “thoughts-essences” “ídols” and on the other, the vital embodiments of those “thoughts-essences” “the characters”.
And why not? Race artists always surprise us.