Latin America rediscovers the work by Venezuelan master Oswaldo Vigas
By Carlos Meneses Sánchez
La vanguardia
Spain. July, 2015
Bogotá, July 15 (EFE) - From his childhood to his last breath, the Venezuelan master Oswaldo Vigas devoted a lifetime to create his own art, in which he reaffirmed his Latin roots and his admiration for the woman in works full of strength that can be admired from this Thursday at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art.
Master Vigas' story (Valencia, 1926) is worthy of a novel, since his father died at age 80, when he was only eight years old and his mother, a young woman in her early 20's, had to be the one who took over him and his brothers.
The future painter and sculptor took the pencil with only 13 years old and did not let it go until April 22, 2014, the date of his death in Caracas.
A life devoted to art adventure with paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics and tapestries all linked to the abstract expression, but without forgetting the figurative components that never disappeared in his career.
“He lived art completely”, his wife Janine Vigas, native of Toulouse (France), recalls in an interview with Efe.
Vigas' paintings, with that composition often violent and those thick lines in black, reflect a delirious character and an impulsive and spontaneous mind.
Such was his passion for painting that “when you ate with him, he was always making drawings on a table napkin without thinking, and then he came and kept all of them”, she says.
Graduated in medicine, Vigas went to Paris for more than a decade to plunge into the European vanguards, though his stay in the French capital did nothing but reaffirm his deep Latin American feeling.
Janine says that “Oswaldo kept feeling like a foreigner”, and therefore he decided to go with her back to Caracas, where they would spend the rest of his days in a 200 square meters studio and in a “small apartment” just above his laboratory of fantasies.
“He was a noctambulant for painting. I remember him waking up at noon because he had gone to bed at four or five in the morning”, recalls his son Lorenzo, now a film director and promoter of the foundation that bears his father’s name.
Vigas' work is part of various movements such as Constructivism or Informalism, but there is one key element that he never abandoned: the female figure.
Lorenzo believes that when the artist left the nest to study medicine and separated from his family, the longing for the motherly figure marked him so deeply that it was then when women began to appear in his compositions.
The Venezuelan master created a feminine archetype that brought together all the kingdoms: the mineral, animal and vegetal kingdoms, hence arising in his unique brujas all kinds of green sprouts, presenting them with textures emanating from the earth.
His sense of belonging was so tight that “separating from any of his works was terrible, they were like his children”, Janine says, adding that “selling them was sometimes a drama”, but he had to survive somehow.
In fact, the artist “never went to a museum so they exhibited him”, which almost caused him the loss of a universal work until his son Lorenzo decided, a year before his death, to create the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation to revive his father’s art.
“It is very significant that, at this time of isolation that Venezuela is in from an economic and cultural point of view, a Venezuelan artist is touring the continent; it is almost like a revelation”, Lorenzo says.
After being present in Lima and Santiago de Chile, the 70 works and five sculptures of Anthological 1943-2013 will be exhibited at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO) until August 23, to then continue its tour around Latin America.
The exhibition will continue in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Panama City, Mexico City, and some cities in the United States, to return to Colombia in February 2016 with a show in Medellin, the second largest city in the country.