The avant-garde work of Latin American artist Oswaldo Vigas is exposed at the MAC USP | Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo
By Silas Martí
Folha de S.Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil. 04/12/2016
A difficult artist to classify, Oswaldo Vigas occupies an uncertain terrain between figuration and abstraction. His works have never lost their link with recognized forms, especially the ones related to the human body, even though they are fragmented or mixed with images of fantastic creatures.
In this sense, the work of the Venezuelan painter and sculptor, which is now the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, never obeyed the canons established by the constructive avant-garde theories.
Vigas died at age 87, two years ago he flirted with the so called “geometrization” which was widely recognized during the XX century, after cubism. However, he never gave himself entirely to his orthodoxy, as he always maintained in his works an arsenal of strange beings that appeared unobtrusively between squares and rectangles, but which always were there, breathing on the horizon.
While he was still young, Vigas had the opportunity to see in Caracas the work of Cuban surrealist Wifredo Lam, who was marked by a particular approach towards mythology. Later in the 50s, while living in Paris, he met Picasso and started to experiment with his own geometrism.
"All of them were part of the same scene," says Dutch Katja Weitering, who organized the exhibition. "Vigas developed archetypical and ancestral figures, but it was the first who used the pre-Hispanic past as an inspiration for his work."
In other words, he created a bridge between Lam and Picasso, two pillars of his aesthetic universe. Vigas’ work shows the colors and forms of the primitive art of his country in order to build the foundations of what later would be considered as Latin American art, an attempt to unify and define the most innovative approaches of that whole region.
In recent years, moreover, the art known as Latinamerican art has become a kind of fashion in the global scene. However, although Brazil was always more related to Europe and the United States, it has slowly been strengthening ties with its neighbors.
While some Venezuelan masters like Alejandro Otero and Armando Reverón began to be recognized in Brazil at the edition of the Biennial of São Paulo organized four years ago by Luis Pérez-Oramas, which also presented the works of a number of Latin American authors, Vigas still remained unknown to Brazilians.
According to Weitering, one reason for his anonymity is the fact that this artist left the city of Paris to return to his homeland. Also, another issue that may have determined that Vigas was not known in Brazil was, according to the curator, the nonlinearity in his work, which went through moments of more abstraction and others of less abstraction, which led him to return to past experiences without being afraid that it might seem a setback.
"It is interesting to see how he started to paint with a much freer style" says Weitering. "He marked very well that moment in which he left in oblivion his most conservative ideas and everything began to move at a greater speed."