Oswaldo Vigas
Juan Liscano
El Nacional
Caracas, Venezuela. 1990
The world of Venezuelan plastic arts changed a lot since the blessed times of the so called Landscape School of Caracas (Escuela Paisajística de Caracas), when painters and critics were closely united towards the indifference of society. Only a few wealthy refined families were able to buy paintings. It was the time when Alfredo Boulton began his great work of animator, critic and acquirer of paintings. The arrival of a painter (Elisa Elvira Zuloaga) to the Department of Culture at the Ministry of Education was the generous encouragement and thanks to her, in 1948-49, the Free Workshop (Taller Libre) was born. At that time, the School of Visual Arts was in crisis and some outstanding alumni started to turn away from it.
Nowadays, the “marchandage”, the predominance of auctions, the rating based solely on price, the partiality of the critics or the lack of them, transformed the human relations into a cockfighting. This is why I fearfully venture into issuing favorable reports for the painter Oswaldo Vigas, due to the impressive retrospective and current exhibition of his works at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I applaud that we can pay tribute to a living Venezuelan painter.
Vigas arrived at the Free Workshop at age 23, his painter vocation already defined and his decision to depart from landscaping. The exhibition shows illustrations for poems and surprising for that time gouaches, because he starts to experiment with abstract expressionist tendencies. He moves from Guacara to Merida, and there he finds within himself the representation of the female. This presence will persist throughout his work so far accomplished by multiplying what he, since 1951, called Brujas (Witches). With the Gran Bruja he obtained in 1952 the National Prize of Plastic Arts and with another female figuration, Mujer, the John Boulton Award. The Thirteenth Salon of Venezuelan Art (1952) established him at age 26. He then traveled to Paris, where he settled for 12 years.
Touring carefully throughout his great exhibition, we discover that the witches are far the only reason or topic used by Vigas, even that all the time, they persisted in his interior as an archetype. An archetype of symbolic and bivalent femininity related undoubtedly to all who have known him, with the exceptional being of Nieves Rodriguez Linares Michelena Vigas, his mother. The life and work of this painter manifests positive and creative dependence on women, to which he owes a lot, to both, his mother and his wife, Jeanine, his most devoted admirer. Female figurations tend to become something more: telluric signs, symbols, goddesses mothers, fearful girls who carry emblems.
It would be a mistake to limit the appreciation of this stunning work of visceral expressionism only on the witches. To prove it, he makes experiments full of gestures, the Objects series, the characters, the couples, and the forests. The Vigas imprint is in the colors that are sometimes violent or sometimes more opaque, the pottery -not shown in the exhibition-, the tapestries, the sculptures. This exhibition means more than 40 years of continuous work, focusing on an intellectual telluric complex, on magical ceremonials, on ritual offerings, on fantastic characters and shattered fragments of tumultuous nature of a ghostly reduced animalism, reduced to dentures and crests, feathers and wings. Vigas not only fed on himself, but also on currently expressionistic procedures from the time he lived in Paris -mainly Picasso and Lam-, of a configuration used to create deformed and surreal synthesis with suggestive power. More important and more worthy to be considered is the graphics, composition, violent and harmonious relations of colors, textures, his ability to fill or uncover the space, the pictorial writing. Such assessments correspond more to a specialized critic in fine arts than to us, as we are attracted by anecdotal and cultural factors.
Fortunately, the magnitude of this work and its different levels of valuation are set out in the publication of Armitano and on the text of Gaston Diehl that we had the pleasure of translating. We recommend the purchase of this volume. In addition to the color plates, it contains library hemerographic references, onomastic and a very interesting biographical sketch accompanied by very interesting photographs. His work passes from the walls of the museum to the pages of a book admirably composed.
We are not going to talk about the controversial Vigas. The defense of his generation and of the figurative art is part of the tidal waves that break today against the contours of plastic arts. Vigas chose to be a painter, and he is fully. That is definitive.