Oswaldo Vigas shows the works that he shaved in Paris
Edgar Alfonzo-Sierra
El Nacional
Caracas, Venezuela. March 1st, 2002
The first steps of a Venezuelan in Europe
Carlos Raul Villanueva asked the painter to make five murals for the University City of Caracas, a project that he developed between 1952 and 1957 in France. A selection of these pieces and works on canvas will be on display as from this Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas Sofia Imber.
"The Master Carlos Raul Villanueva told me: shave them; shave the forms. In those early years in Paris I simplified the expression of my paintings. I reduced my anxiety to its soul, its substance, without losing the original meaning that they had reached in Venezuela. At that time I left things in the skeleton, in essence."
This is how Master Oswaldo Vigas explains his first five years in Paris (1952-1957), a city to which he came to on a journey that originally would last only six months. Vigas had won the National Arts Award in 1952, which made him deserve a stay abroad. The artist was only 26 years old and had already received important awards in his country, among others the Arturo Michelena, Lastenia Tello and Ateneo de Valencia awards at the Arturo Michelena Salon, in addition to the John Boulton Annual Official Salon of Venezuelan Art Prize.
"I left Venezuela for the first time by boat. I boarded an ocean liner, which is a travel experience that today no one has any idea. At that time, I was just commissioned by Villanueva to do five murals for the University City of Caracas and I did them in Paris. I had him as a counselor and I really listened to him. He gave me the guidance to depurate the paintings, a need for simplification that, somehow, I already sensed. That commission by Villanueva introduced me to this new format of large public works. From Paris, I began to send him models of these works, copied on paper."
A selection of works from this period of the painter will be on display as from Sunday at 11:00 am at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas Sofia Imber with the name of Oswaldo Vigas. Ideografías de París 1952 - 1957, the curatorship of the exhibition was made by Carlos Silva, who chose some of the mentioned murals projects and large-format reproductions of those projects, as well as oil paintings, gouaches and drawings that were developed in tandem. A total of 200 works are gathered there.
"I was the only Venezuelan who did not attend the Academy of Abstract Art of Victor Vasarely -Vigas explains-. Therefore, my murals have no relation with those of other country artists such as Pascual Navarro and Mateo Manaure. Mine are more organic things, perhaps the most organic things of that period. Works related to nature, which other artists do not have. I continued my work with paintings in which the criterion of Constructivist art is applied, but with a Latin American sense. At that time I did not know the work of Joaquín Torres García and so it is understood that my work cannot be read within his specific Latin American constructivism."
One of the biggest appeals of this show is that it is a testimony of a time when the artist began his international projection. Years in which Vigas made his first exhibition in Paris, attended by Max Ernst, Vasarely and Dewasne, as well as exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid and Galleries in Houston, Amiens, Geneva and Venezuela.
Geometric interstices
Carlos Silva
The geometric had never been alien to our painter, and I do not allude his training works between 1943 and 1949, in which, as in all learner artists of his generation, he was in debt with the cubist Picasso and Kandinsky. I mean that, when Vigas gets consolidated as an artist, with works like Muchacha del abanico (Girl with fan) and El Caucho (The Tire) (1950); Bruja del tapiz amarillo (Witch with a yellow tapestry) and Bruja del ramito (1951); and Gran bruja (Great Witch) (1952), the expressionism of that time, which will be a signature of much of his production, is controlled by linear resources configured in circles, rectangles, trapezoids, frets, small grids, crosses of Lorraine, ovoids, lobes, triangles of cubist form sides, etc. This served as a balance and a containment of the intense iconic vehemence of the characters (which otherwise would have become so unbearable to the viewer as were so many paintings of expressionists such as Munch, Soutine, Nolde, Beckman), therefore and above all at that time, the allegorical mode had possessed Vigas, and the allegorical representation requires the control and the deconstruction of the demonical.
Oswaldo Vigas went through several stages in his creative process, with an unconquerable spirit of inquiry for which he had been preparing with his geometrizations of Caracas, with the intermittent decline awareness and the enhance of the representational object, and perceiving that the geometric abstraction was a great path of the art, but certainly not unique, and especially that it should be covered in a state of constant interpretation, seeking all the interstices as it is shown in this exhibition.