Oswaldo Vigas and the Venezuelan painting
Rafael Squirru
El Universal
Caracas, Venezuela. 1979
Because of his style features, the Venezuelan artist Oswaldo Vigas (born in Valencia, Carabobo, in 1920) constitutes a phenomenon of particular interest within the current broad and bright Venezuelan painting scenario.
The recognition of the international hierarchy of art in Venezuela is linked beyond all possible argument to that group of abstract painters, who as from the color-rhythms of Alejandro Otero (1921) reached the profound impact of kinetic art, achieved through master figures such as Jesus Soto and Cruz Diez.
This fair recognition to the purism of geometric rigor at the plane of global criticism has allowed the less informed viewers to identify Venezuelan art with that particular trend, thus, forgetting certain highlighted artists who by their temperament and aesthetic convictions remain firm in the development of if not opposed, at least divergent issues. Such is the case of Oswaldo Vigas. Anyone who has visited his studio in the thriving city of Caracas will attest the deep popular roots that inspire the visual and even acoustic concerns of Vigas.
With a deep knowledge of the folklore of his country, Vigas is not afraid of the kinship with other artists of the Caribbean area with which he inevitably connects from common concerns and principles. Such is the case regarding the Cuban Wifredo Lam. But in this case, to our believe, it would be shortsighted not to realize common sources of inspiration, the poor deduction of subtracting Vigas the important ingredient of originality that marks the untransferable personality of his works.
It would not even be wise for me to include both artists within the same school. While Lam suggested through his delicate and subtle compositions an affinity accepted by the critics, with surrealism, Vigas has nothing to do with that dreamlike dimension, inserting his work into an expressionism where the force of what is specifically plastic plays the leading role.
Black art fetishes that certainly poke Lam’s subconscious are instead the vigorous springs that trigger the vigorous cascade of colors and nervous drawings that distinguishes the art of Vigas. Who bears in mind the mood and rhythm of the sounds of Barlovento, will be in a much more adequate condition to enter this world of visual ease that Vigas proposes.
There is something like an incorrigible optimism in his painting, a vital joy, a faith in the common destiny of our cultures that gives his paintings that vibration that separates what is born of a real expressive need, from the deadlock of imitation.
Someone might object that Vigas’ art develops dangerously into extension and would prefer that this dimension would be changed by a greater emphasis on the completion of each job. Such an accusation would seem to me unfair since it has little or nothing to do with the fundamental issue of quality, as it is just about a matter of temperament. The same objection could be made without a whim to Picasso, who with the same temperamental requirement, worked with similar impudence.
Sometimes the branches are the ones that don’t let us see the forest. To me, that is what happens with the important work of Vigas.
The selective eye that can approach his work, will certainly collect a positive balance from which a spirit ardently turned to the pristine forces of the earth derives from, a work that breathes authenticity in each one of its sides, the accumulation by points of a well-deserved victory by the man that transmutes matter into what grants him the dimension of what is timeless, of what is transcendent.
Vibrant with color, tense in the form, baroque in the composition of unstable equilibrium, American in the roots that sustain his legitimate inspiration, by its own right, the art of Oswaldo Vigas takes an unavoidable place in the plastic of our continent.