My friend, the painter Oswaldo Vigas
Juan Sánchez Peláez
El Nacional
Caracas, Venezuela. 23 de August de 1957
(Paris, August, 1957)
I must confess that I thought about hiding under the journalistic anonymity because the truth is that I had set out simply and concisely to make an interview to Oswaldo Vigas on the eve of his return to Venezuela. I would try, whenever possible, to be objective, and impersonal at all costs. Then, I blotted out that purpose as vain: Vigas was one of us; something exciting and clear in the process of being formulated by the people of my generation found a deep root in his pictorial message and in his unveiled human horizon. On the other hand, I have had to repudiate in an intimate way, so much credit or favor that has been agreed between us and the artists, and that would make them appear to the public as finalists of a sports tournament. In this sense, the headlines that lead some information on the activities of artists in Europe inspire a genuine horror to the aforementioned artists. Certain journalists send their comments from Paris to America, which are excessive in terms of praise, and malicious, because they establish a terrible confusion of moral values.
My friend, the painter Oswaldo Vigas, lives in Dauphine Street, in the heart of the bustling Latin Quarter, and I live on the outskirts of the big city. When I arrived in Paris, I used to go to his studio and there I felt lost not infrequently, flailing about waves of colors, Japanese prints, antique prints of rare perfection, paintings by Vasarely, Manessier, Guayasamin, and together, all the complicated painting mythology through its most diverse eras. It was like entering the kingdom of Wonderland, to step on a litter of sleep, or open the doors of a tiny, fantastic museum. While the fast-paced life kept beating outside, inside, in that strange room, I witnessed the work of a man absorbed in the deep task of a diver, or of a lamp man, or of a Goldsmith of subtle findings. I dated back the memories, evoking our hectic age in late 1951. At this point, it would seem unfair to look longingly or discharge and punish the past with the usual rest of the bourgeois, as a sin of youth. The years -it has been told us with exaggeration- dims out a lot of our illusions. And my friend Oswaldo Vigas was one of the few people that in this time of general doubt had faith and went on believing. From this kind of attitude, an air of perennial childhood has arisen from him. He is among us the one who has fought the most against aging and the one who has kept a greater flow of creative dynamism. I understand that sometimes between his work and mine stands a wall. That I must walk through a wall of great thickness, a weed, slowly climb a tower to perceive, living and entirely, the areas of mystery that he offers me. It has also happened to me that the pictorial language of Vigas has been delivered to me from the first contact, naked and familiar, after a magical round of animals and deluded beings.
I have written a few lines to Oswaldo to be able to see him, to restart a dialogue before his departure, and now I transcribe his words, the signals, the weak and fugitive signs of our talk. I avoid, though, any serious foray into closed domains of pictorial theory. Here lies a never cleared field in which only the daily chore matters, the loot which was extracted from darkness, from clarity or from permanent oblivion.
Oswaldo knows the temptation of modern art is freedom and that any hint back to fixed precepts, already invalidated by history, is nothing less than suicide. Hence, I repeat, that the terms of our personal talk aims to exclusively personal matters, and in the first person, he tells me:
"For me, Paris is not the name of a city, but the world. It has been also America for me. A vision of the present and the future. Whatever my concerns and my experience are, they gravitate unequivocally around my painting. In Paris we are all on the same level, as if we were confronting the final judgment.
To stroll through the museums of Europe is important for a painter of South America, because by doing that, we clean our eyes from the pastry vision of Skira Editions. Some might shun from the museums, as a patient may shun from the doctor, not so much because of the disease, but for fear of diagnosis. In those museums I merely became aquainted with what I had learned and forgotten since long ago: I met Goya and El Greco in Spain, Gauguin, Rouault, Kandinsky, Picasso in France, as I know Magnelli, Matta, Pettoruti, Manessier, Pignon, Vasarely and many others, "tȇte à tȇte", to the point that I no longer know who are living and who are dead. I've seen them all in this present time. I saw Paul Uccello in a room of the Louvre, and at the exit, at the other side of my house, and at number 33 on the street parallel to mine, I saw Pablo Picasso. The future? It is something else. I am obliged to conquer the future of my painting every day ...”
Oswaldo Vigas returns to our country in late September and will exhibit at the galleries of the Eugenio Mendoza Foundation and then, in the United States. He shows, above all, a very special interest in seeing closely the recent works of Venezuelan plastic. This trip, according to his verbal language is a "dive", a chance to observe with a deep affection pupil, a Venezuela from which he has been absent for six years.
Judge yourself about the sincerity of this painter when he says: "I cannot keep painting my witches because my painting has followed a natural and inevitable evolution. I seek to renew myself, I'm in the process to storm new forms, real or imagined. I cannot give up this process that fulfills inside of me only for the hope of being flattered. However, I believe that the fingerprints from my previous era are dormant in this process. "
Vigas will return to Paris early next year. He will continue here with his patient, almost monastic activity, to reveal to others through his art, the best of himself.