Oswaldo Vigas’ Witches disembark at the Museo de Bellas Artes
By: Cecilia Valdés Urrutia
El Mercurio
Santiago de Chile, Chile. January, 2015
First time in Chile, Venezuelan master anthology (1943 – 2013)
The shadows of trees and the Cabriales river waves in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo, were the surrounding landscapes that Oswaldo Vigas first encountered. His early works were intensely baroque, inhabited by fantastic characters extracted from scattered art history lectures and from conversations with his young poet friends. He got immersed in the Pre-Hispanic cultures’ esthetic world and was deeply impressed by the feminine figure of the “Flattened Venus with coffee grains eyes”, from which he took different body features for the creation of the mysterious character that became his main theme and esthetic: “The Witches”.
Throughout his life he obtained dozens of awards like the National Fine Arts of Venezuela award, the Andrés Bello Order and the French government’s Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres Order. The distinguished historian and curator Bélgica Rodríguez explains to Arts and Letters that Vigas’ contributions can be summarized in two facts: “His fidelity to the painting-painting at times when it was being disdained, and focusing his creative sight toward Latin Americas’ ancestral cultures, which were not taken into account for the creation of a universal language”.
Recognized as a Latin America’s art expert and one of Vigas’ main experts, the Venezuelan curator and ex president of the International Art Critics Association (AICA in Spanish) knows exactly what she is talking about. Very close to artists like Fernando de Szyszlo and Jesús Soto, Rodríguez tells us that “Soto constantly visited our house with his guitar to sing boleros, and was very attracted to my husband’s work who is a genetics and bacteriologist scientist and researcher, something that for me was very odd, because being a kinetic artist, his interest was more towards the physics than to the quantum scientists”.
Even though Vigas dissented with kinetic art, he was an admirer of the work of Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz Diez. Rodríguez asseverates that “Oswaldo was a man with a strong character but very generous with other artists. He produced an enormous amount of works because he painted day and night; therefore he was very aware of the importance of his paintings, a fact that made him stood up for his work against everyone and everything”. Of all the universe of works produced by Vigas, only 70 carefully chosen paintings will arrive on Thursday to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
Organized by the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation based in the United States of America, the anthology traveling through Latin America focuses around the figurative expressionist paintings by the author. Rodríguez, who along with AICA’s actual president Marek Bartelik will be arriving to Santiago for the exhibition and will also be dialoging during a gathering at the museum at 6 p.m. on the opening day, about the authors’ contributions to Latin American Art, states that “the anthology is sustained on the conceptual coherence of an artist that never became attached to the different fashions”.
The flattened Venus and the Gran Bruja.
Oswaldo Vigas discribed how he started to shape the form of his first witch, an image he extracted from the “Venus with coffee grains eyes”. “After I flattened the head, I stretched the neck, made her ribs stand out, ripped apart some hands and feet fingers. I put on some tree branches and tropical fruits, and in order not to offend anyone in the animal kingdom, I covered her with crystals and oxide…”
That 1951 Gran bruja let him won the National Art award in 1952, in spite of the strong controversies that arose in his country, because of the conceptual proposal. He took advantage of the pictorial language’s questioning junctures for his paintings, and inverts them by fragmenting those questionings into their minimal expression.
The curator stresses that “Vigas is concerned by the direct perception and the fluid sensations. The witches are at the same time aggressive and kind, close to the figurative expressionism that are peculiar of the historic avant-guard from Europe and New York”.
In the 1950s, in Paris, Vigas turns toward the geometric and the abstract, making the features of his witches more subtle. He is invited to participate in Caracas in the “Project of arts integration” mural, working with artists like Fernand Léger, Víctor Vasarely and Alexander Calder, a work that was later declared human heritage of the world.
According to the curator, “Vigas then goes through a constructivist stage, an informalist stage, but still presently maintaining the mysterious Pre-Hispanic cosmogony theme with the figure of fecundity –“the Vigas’ witch”, even in some painting where he seems to drift away from this figure”.
A detailed analysis of his paintings show strokes of the witch’s figure underneath the pictorial layers. “His concern for this figure endures and reveals that it is always the same witch, maintaining also the reasons which made him care for the Pre-Hispanic’s past, more specifically, the past of his country, Venezuela”.
Among the key works arriving to the museum Rodríguez highlights: Ciudadano elector, 1943, an influential painting that opens up formal and conceptual doors at his early production stages. Bruja Infante, 1961; Floreciente, 1967; Oleronesa, 1980; Diablesco, 1999; Con un pájaro en la cabeza and Gran curandera, from 2011.
Close to Matta, Lam, De Szyszlo
By looking at Vigas’ paintings, one can find a formal resemblance with certain Lam, Matta and the European group Cobra’s iconography, and according to the curator Ernesto Muñoz, there is a clear relationship with the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García in regards to his most constructivist side.
The Venezuelan curator admits that Lam, Matta and Vigas “develop totally different and paradoxically similar plastic aesthetics; all of them showing influence of Picasso’s cubism. In order to elaborate an alphabet that could identify them as universal Latin American artists, Lam, Matta and Vigas got attracted to surrealism, ending up inquiring in the human being, in mother nature, in the beliefs and in the Pre-Hispanic cultures.
Rodríguez supports that neither of them influenced on each other’s image, “but from the conceptual aspect it is obvious that there was an influence; Picasso’s surrealism offered them the necessary tools that contributed to their growth as artists”. Vigas, with the help of a pianist friend, met Picasso at the house of the Spanish master in Cannes, called La Californie, where a young Vigas had the chance to take a picture with Picasso while enjoying the summer in the Blue Coast in France.
In the Paris of the 1950s, Vigas meets Matta and Lam, and gathers with Argentinian artist Antonio Berni (creator of the character Juanito Laguna) and Fernando de Szyszlo. The Peruvian painter met Vigas in 1953 and recalls: I was returning to Paris from Lima and was not able due to my modest economic possibilities to find a place to live. He helped me to settle at the small hotel where he was living at the time, the Hotel Poitou, 22 de la Rue de Seine, in Saint Germain des Prés. Jesús Soto had previously lived there, and at the time, other artists like the Venezuelan sculptor Víctor Valera, the Cuban poet José Álvarez Baraga, the Peruvian musician José Malsio, the Peruvian art critic Carlos Rodríguez Saavedra and many others, were usual guests.
Muñoz points out that Vigas also worked at Hayter’s engraving studio. He was not totally unconnected from the Chilean art atmosphere: Arturo Michelena (1863-1898) his ancestor, was a portraitist of the great Chilean sculptor Virginio Arias, whose work is also part of the Museo de Bellas Artes collection.
But is the contribution and quality of Oswaldo Vigas’ work, what makes him one of “Latin American art’s pioneer”, Bélgica Rodríguez asserts, and “in comparison with his contemporaries, the Venezuelan master stands up at the same heights as Lam or Matta, even though he had to ‘row alone’ because he did not belong to any particular trend”. Vigas stands up as a painter-painter because he states the language and does not compromise to fashions.