Janine Vigas: the woman behind Oswaldo
Carlos Flores León-Márquez
Clímax – El Estímulo
Caracas, Venezuela
Photos: Carmen Arroyo
06/21/2016
Two years have passed since the master's death, eight months have passed since Madame Vigas has not been in Venezuela due to health problems and just few days since her son Lorenzo received the Golden Lion at Venice; but here is Janine, restarting after a long pause, all her activities with a lot of energy, and satiated with Oswaldo’s colors.
"I am Janine, nothing more than Janine" she answers quickly to our question, but with a gentle, serene, smiling and sweet attitude. "Mom did not give me other names and my dad either; so I am just Janine Vigas Castes ". And she answers at the interview that I make here at Los Dos Caminos, Caracas, Venezuela, a few days after her return from France where this conversation was finally finished. "My dear friend, Dilia Hernandez, director of the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation has just given me your message. I must first thank you for not forgetting about me because I have almost been a year out of Venezuela due to health problems, and because of the current situation in Venezuela, I was advised to go to France in order to get proper health treatment. If this doesn’t take me a lot of time to do, I think I will be back in the country in March. But I guess you do not want to wait so long to make this interview. The solution could be to do the interview in writing or by phone. I would be delighted to talk about all the issues that you ask me about. Très amicalement à vous, Janine Vigas.”
The first line returned the courtesy: "We welcome that the heralds have had the courtesy to announce us. And it would be impossible to forget you: the banners cannot be forgotten". The rest is a story that starts in her childhood, goes through adolescence, through adulthood when she falls in love with the great painter and ends up here and now.
"I was born on June 15th, 1935 in Montauban; I am a Gemini. Montauban is a beautiful city fifty kilometers from Toulouse, southwest France, where you eat well, where foie gras is made. Mine was a childhood shared between my hometown and Paris, because my parents moved there quickly. But since I was very young during World War II, I spent a lot of time, holidays and all those things including the entire war, at my grandparent’s house in Montauban, who were already retired”. So, did Janine show some sensitivity for the arts? "I would rather say I was more attracted by the show, because I was told that since I was three years old, I used to sing and dance at all the family gatherings. One day my grandfather said, 'Elle montrerá sur les planches'; it means 'she will go on stage'. And indeed, I did a lot of theater in Paris. I loved acting."
Daughter of an industrial designer who was prone for literature, and who died when he was just 38 years old because of that evil sickness that struck the early twentieth century called tuberculosis, and a mother who she defines as extraordinary, strong, and who had the responsibility to raise three daughters on her own, Janine will soon boast, unrestricted, "Mom suffered a lot when Janine told her one day: 'I am going to Venezuela'. That was devastating for her because Janine was, of the three, perhaps the brightest. Years after, she understood it. "Thus, from the theater she passed into law, from which she withdrew when she was just at her third year to graduate as executive secretary", in France, this was the most confidante person of any big industrial or executive. And so it was until I stopped working that I came to Venezuela."
Was that the moment when you met master Oswaldo Vigas? "That's a nice story. This episode just goes along perfectly with my working issues because at that time I was the secretary of a music publisher: Levi Alvarez, who had edited his first album of Latin American music with a group of folk musicians who had come to Paris to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. When he saw that potential, he edited it and then won the Academy grand prize. So, suddenly a big number of Latin Americans who were in Paris and which came to see him appeared. One day a woman called Hélène, who had a section dedicated to the Jeunesses Musicales de France and was supporting a Venezuelan group, arrived. And Mister Alvarez, my boss told me: "Janine, because you are someone who likes everything that speaks Spanish, you are going to represent me. I am going to call your mom to tell her that tomorrow you will be coming home a little bit late”. So I agreed and it was when I met the Venezuelans artists of the time, including Jesus Soto, Angel Hurtado, Humberto Jaimes Sanchez -who played percussion with little spoons- and Oswaldo Vigas- who played the maracas. I walked in and they were playing the Catira Rosa Angelina of Juan Vicente Torrealba. And Janine was, for the time, just seventeen, one Catira (blonde) Rosa Angelina. So all of them came and welcomed me, Oswaldo asked me to dance joropo, and I danced it as good as I could."
She, the beautiful charmed girl; the daughter of Midi-Pyrénées native parents dancing to the sound of the harp, "called by the string", Oswaldo tapping with his feet and Janine scraping the floor with her feet? The crowd was stunned and as exhilarated as the audience that was present when master Vigas received in 1993 the Order of Knight of Arts and Letters given by the French minister of culture of the time. And when it was time to give the speech, he mention the 12 wonderful years he lived in Paris, and at the end he added something funny: "Moreover, as everyone knows, I am married to a French woman of the deep France!". And Janine added: "That made all the people laugh. Yes, I am a French woman of the deep France, that is to say, pure French breed. Of oui, of the breed from province, of the breed that really maintains its identity". However, she says this with a laugh in a way that expresses pleasantry and but that also makes her blush, because Janine has no poses, no pride, or haughtiness. She does not speak with a loud voice. She is like a stream that is crystalline, full, and warm; a stream put in the world to hydrate, to reflect, to feed, to subjugate.
In a documentary, Janine Castes confessed that the master always became Oswaldo Vigas at six in the evening; something that immediately makes me ask: So what time was devoted to Janine? "Oh, I went down a lot with him to the atelier. Well, yes, Oswaldo was a night person. And I, who was born totally used to live my life in the opposite, how can I say it? I loved mornings, had to get used to this new lifestyle. Today I can hardly go to bed before two o'clock at night. Once all the turmoil of the day is over, I find myself so happy at night reading and answering my emails. I see the French news at seven in the evening. Sometimes I just catch a movie that I have wanted to see all my life, and I stay up until very late. Then, at 8:30 pm I have already taken dinner, and then the night just starts for me. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, one, two... those are my hours."
Some people say that the love of Janine and Oswaldo was an unprecedented love, even though when the Valencian painter, muralist, ceramicist, printmaker, sculptor, tapissier and even poet - a modern Renaissance poet - was courted because of his good looks and talent by all the possible nymphs. Janine validates this: "Oh, ours was a complete love. I understood him, and he understood me. I would never have accepted for him to deceive me. Oswaldo was very handsome and prowled. He was intelligent, interesting and all these things. But it was complete. Our love was one based on our mutual understanding. Our way of living, of seeing life, of seeing art, all these things, I do not know how explain it to you. We were so close, so close... oh my God. [Her voice breaks and tears start to run down her face]. I still sorely need Oswaldo, and I am going to miss him for the rest of the life that I have left. But right now I have just had a great compensation: I am 81 years old and I have my first grandchild."
The Golden Lion at Venice in September 2015 for the film From Afar and the grandson in December of the same year, both products of Lorenzo the filmmaker, his only son. "But Lorenzo is a great achievement of Oswaldo and Janine. Why? Because there artists generally do not think about having children, and even though he is their only son, Lorenzo became what he already is. Someone who studied other careers: marine science, marine biology. Then he was about to have a doctorate in cellular biology, when suddenly, there came the passion for cinema, a passion that was growing inside him since he was 15 years old, because at that age we gave him a Super-8 camera as a gift. From that moment on, when Lorenzo had that camera on his hands, he started to make I do not know how many films here in the studio of his father, with his school friends of the Francia School. With one of the pieces of our collection of pre-Columbian art he made a short film about a monster, a film of which right now, I do not recall the name. Well, that is Lorenzo."
It is said that master Vigas was a total sybarite. It is known that Janine likes to eat a lot, but she is also a princess. Having had a grandmother, a mother and an older sister that were cuisinières, she never needed to go into the kitchen and never liked stoves. But when she decided to do something like - for example her famous rabbit in gibelotte - she then opened the book with the recipe and followed it step by step, gram for gram, and it ended up being perfect; but just like that, without improvising, totally the opposite of Vigas. "Oswaldo was a born chef. When I met him in Paris, he cooked a lot and his friends would come by to eat. He always liked good food and invented very delicious dishes. He made the Brandade de morue – Brandade of cod – following his own approach, which was great. All sea related meals like octopus, baked fish, and baked vegetables."
An artist of international value, poet, chef, relative of one of Venezuelan’s national hero: Antonio Jose de Sucre, attentive husband, “an endless love human being", exemplary father... would there be anything to reproach to the genius? And Janine says - raising her stare, scanning the space, getting lost between strokes, frames, souvenirs, crucifixions, healers, unfinished paintings, Lorenzo’s child stool transformed into a fossilized palette - "Yes, one thing that I reproach and which earned him many enemies was the fact of being so direct, so honest. Anything that people asked him, he answered it right away honestly and saying what he felt. Oswaldo wrote a poem that says: 'I spent half of my life insulting people and the other half apologizing to them."
With more than 80 years behind her, Janine does not agree with contemporary art; she prefers modern art because it is very hard for her to accept that something that is lying on the floor, without any apparent interest, is a great work of art. "I just visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I began to mourn at least three times watching those four floors full of post-impressionists", she says. But she confesses to appreciate the work of young Venezuelan painters like Astolfo Funes, Julian Villafane, José Vivenes, Paul Parrella and Carlos Anzola. "I do not know what to think of the future of art. The art has gone so many different ways, but I think it will return to the source. There is a well-known Venezuelan character who once said, ‘The time of the pictures that hang from a nail is over'. An affirmation at which Marta Traba - Argentine-Colombian famous critic and writer of the era- responded very strongly with a blow with the hammer on the nail. “That is the history of art in Venezuela. "
Venezuela, the barbaric, the primordial, the oil slathered sophisticated animal that does not yet know why its skin does not breathe. Venezuela, the country with the beautiful pavilion in Venice- designed by the celebrated architect Carlo Scarpa- that was left in oblivion and took so long to restore. Venezuela the contradictory, the one that joined Oswaldo and Janine. "After that joropo dance in Paris, Oswaldo walked me to the subway, and naturally I liked that it was him and not another one of the artists that were present. On the way he said to me, 'Miss, what do you think of Venezuela?’ So I said, 'Well, sir, I think it is a primitive country". To which he rebuked me: 'And do you think I am primitive?' I had to swear to him: 'No, you are not primitive!' ".