The Different Visages of Venus
By: Enrique Planas
El Comercio
Lima, Perú. January, 2014
For the first time in 40 years, late Venezuelan master Oswaldo Vigas’ Works can be seen at the MAC.
He passed away in Caracas last April at the age of 87. He wanted to come along with the exhibition to Lima, a city that had not exhibited his work since the 1970s; but now that he is absent, it is going to be very hard to assist to the exhibition that is going to be shown at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Vigas’ son Lorenzo, filmmaker and director of the Vigas Foundation comments: “His death impacted me deeply. He has been gone only for five months and we still mourn him”.
The curator Bélgica Rodríguez is the responsible of the design of the Venezuelan master’s anthology.
Lorenzo Vigas explains that “his main concern was to show, along his 70 years of plastic work, how the human figure kept changing. The figures in my father’s work come from Pre-Hispanic images with flattened heads called the Venus of Tacarigua. Femenine figures made of clay, that were discovered in Tacarigua, a place close to the city where my father was born, Valencia.
Those early Works made in 1951 were the beginning of his obsession to link the Venezuelan Pre-Hispanic heritage with the contemporary plastic.
“Over time, those Venus kept changing, sometimes becoming abstract, sometimes becoming geometrical. They are archetypal figures that have a strong relationship with motherhood”. Vigas points out that “The exhibition’s main idea is to review in my father’s work, the different changes that this feminine icon has undergone”.
Oswaldo Vigas’ work during his life was a counterpoint to the strength of the kinetic art, the predominant and antagonistic artistic school in Venezuela. “There was a time that the kinetic art was the official art in Venezuela. The kinetic artists expressed that the art of painting was finished, that the painters were worth nothing; and my father, who strongly criticized this official vision even on newspapers during the 1970s, had heated fights with artist like his good friend Jesus Soto and curators that openly privileged kinetic art over everything else” recalls his son.
There is no doubt that the Peruvian spectator will find Vigas’ language very familiar, because it dialogues intimately with the discourse of our pictorial modernity, making us understand why our own master Fernando de Szyszlo had such a profound friendship with the Venezuelan artist.
“My father not only had a strong friendship with Szyszlo, he also admired him very much as an artist”. “They both met in Paris in the 1950s, and might have been bounded together by the shared vision they had of an art that brought us back to our roots, an art that could consolidate us with our identity”, remembers Vigas.
Road Movie with dad
Lorenzo Vigas recently concluded after a period of work that lasted for 4 years, a documental about his father’s work entitled El vendedor de orquídeas (The ochid seller), which records a trip made by father and son throughout Venezuela in search of a painting made by Oswaldo in his youth.
El vendedor de orquideas is one of my father’s first paintings, one that he painted when he was 15 years old and never saw again. When he made that painting he was in the early stages of his learning process, doing figurative painting by copying his motifs from popular markets, a time when he still had not find his modern language. The thing that always intrigued me was his need to see that painting again, a painting which he talked about all his life and wanted eagerly to rediscover. I found out later that there were very strong emotional reasons because that painting connected my father to a brother I never met: my uncle Reinaldo, who died when he was 26 years old. The film is about the quest to find that painting, a project that my father suggested to me and which took us through all the places where he lived before he moved to Paris in 1952, just after he earned the doctors degree”.
So, El vendedor de orquídeas, as Vigas explains, is a movie about memory, a ‘road movie’ shared with his father, and of course, a way that the filmmaker has found to ease the pain for his absence. “It was a heavy but at the same time liberating process”, Vigas admits. “I review the film and I still feel that my father is alive. I have found a way to delay that painful moment and accept my heritage: I am someone who makes movies and at the same time diffuses his father’s work. This documental really helped me to understand my position and the things I wanted to do”.
- At the end, did you find the painting? I ask.
- That, is something I am not going to tell you- he adds.