Oswaldo Vigas: An illustrious unknown
Luciana Pareja Norbiato
Select
São Paulo, Brazil. 04/01/2016
The exhibition at the MAC USP shows Brazil an exponent of Venezuelan modernism
Who is Oswaldo Vigas? The greatest representative of the Venezuelan modernism, who is virtually unknown in Brazil, is now becoming a common name thanks to the exhibition Anthological 1943 - 2013. The sample includes 70 years of the artist's career, who was born in 1926 and died two years ago. Five of his sculptures, some bronze engravings and 63 paintings with various formats -many of them huge- will be shown. "The public will tour through the sample, walking through five environments and, when they reach the last space, they will have the chance to watch a movie in which the artistic path of Oswaldo Vigas is shown. Then, they will come out of that room and will again walk throughout the exhibition and see everything with a new and much deeper perspective", explains the head of the Brazilian version of the exhibition, Dutch architect Jowa Imre Kis-Jovak.
All along the exhibition, the public will admire different works that were organized by themed lounges and large panels, in which most of the artistic career of Vigas is shown. This proposal reflects the desire to make him known beyond the Venezuelan’s borders, especially in Brazil. The curatorship of the exhibition that will be made in Brazil was in charge of Bélgica Rodriguez (former director of the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington) with the help of Katja Weitering.
Weitering is the director of the CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam (where the collection of the modernist group of the same name is preserved and whose programming is focused on the art developed during this period) and even though she lived between 1952 and 1964 in Paris and have shared with highly recognized people in the art world, such as Picasso, Léger and Magritte, she never met Vigas. However, Katja Weitering learned about the artist and the foundation that is responsible for maintaining his legacy when a press conference was made at the Cobra Museum. "I had never heard about Oswaldo Vigas. What struck me about his works was the multifaceted character, because he made paintings, prints, sculptures, tapestries, drawings, ceramics and metalwork. It is all about very different types of works, but at the end, they are all Oswaldo Vigas", told the co-curator to Select Magazine. From that conversation arose the possibility of helping with the exhibition.
The fact that they decided to play with chronology and placed face to face the works that correspond to the same subject, but in different periods, has strengthened the multifaceted vision of Vigas. It may either be present in more constructivist paintings, using techniques of Cubism or drawing upon the color paste and physical aspect to make his paintings, all the works of Vigas refer to the South American primitivism, with its totems and tribal elements, which were always led by the figure of the great Mother, which generated the world.
However, the works themselves do not tell the story of the artist: his brushes, personal objects, masks, tribal dolls belonging to his collection and a series of documents, sketches and letters are displayed. "We wanted to get beyond the figure of the artist to show the man who is behind the works, because to be honest, Vigas was a great cultural agitator of his time. In Venezuela he created the film festival that still exists today, organized exhibitions, was the cultural attaché in Europe and directed cultural centers in Venezuela. However, because he was not interested in selling his own work, he was not so well known as other artists of his time" explains Katja Weitering. With the exhibition Anthological 1943 - 2013, Brazil will very well know who Oswaldo Vigas was.