The lineage of the lost
Marta Traba
El Comercio
Lima, Perú. September, 1977
Oswaldo Vigas has gathered a meticulous retrospective that encompasses thirty years of his work as a painter.
A serious and thoughtful man who has been developing and thinking this work as a coherent pictorial body, Vigas belongs to a remarkable contemporary lineage, the lineage of “the lost”.
He included there all the valuable Latin American artists that slowly followed a viewpoint without accepting changes imposed from outside by the pressure of fashion or the urgency of change. This point of view corresponds both the intention to express personal experiences and the hope that such experiences are related no matter which way, with the inescapable reality of either a national or continental media that is different from the European or American culture.
“The lost” therefore reject the idea that contemporary art must compete with the lines of technological and scientific advance that correspond to the highly industrialized countries on the one hand; and secondly, they also reject competition with pseudo-artistic products of the mass media which have transformed the artistic task into a more undifferentiated activity in relation to the consumer society.
These two rejections instantly transform “the lost” into out of present and place archaic individuals, at least from the perspective of the dominant avant-garde tendencies. But "present" is not synonymous with "time", as well as "place" does not have to be synonymous with "site". ”The lost” prefer to keep accepting the notion of "time", with its inevitable marginalization of an episodic and frustrating “today, now”, as well as with a despotic “present” and they embrace the cause of a "place", although being ticked as peasants reluctant to accept a hypothetical universalism.
It is in this context of decisions that nowadays are of much more importance than to swim with the sad current of deterioration and improvisation defended by magazines, galleries and museums around the world, that we must place the work of Oswaldo Vigas.
How have you expressed yourself within this framework?
Compose concern and the concern of transmitting strong feelings and emotions to the viewer, seem to lead this pictorial work.
As for the former, Vigas acts as a careful and observant artist, conscientious to European abstract and expressionist formulations from which he gets a profitable lesson: however, his work does not accuse any particular influence, but prefers to move in the higher orbit of expressionist freedom where shapes and colors are emphasized to build a dynamic and emotional whole.
Alternatively, and in a very logical and cyclically way, this composition has undergone over ordered areas, marked by a clear geometrical tendency and over specifically unbalanced areas. A tight selection of colors has accompanied such changes: tonal sets have been followed by strident periods, and then by dark moments where color and light withdraw. The various situations are always resolved within the painting, except for a brief period of great insight and finesse, when he, along with Venezuelan’s major painting Staff of the time, addresses the textual experience of informalism.
So described, the work of Vigas seem dominated by a formal spirit that would be above the will of meaning, as well as for a strong professional conscience that leads him to the daily task of a tireless painting discipline. If this second assumption is quite true because Vigas has, like few others, faith in the profession of painting, it should instead be worth to add to his formal searches and to the caution of his developments in one direction or in its opposite, an unambiguous interest to communicate.
While formalism involves closed acts, that in themselves find their own satisfactions and turn away by the transmission as well as for the relationship with the public, the painting of Vigas is performed in constant vigilance in regard to the public of the viewer, media, artist trilogy.
Sometimes this desire becomes visible and apparent, as in a time of visions, of purely Venezuelan land cuts transferred to powerful and bright chromatic synthesis, or to the excellent witches stage where Vigas ventures into a national substrate traversed by superstitions and magic formulas.
Sometimes the message is more complex and immediate, when he resolves plastic situations where the order or disorder is installed: the happiest in these cases are those where Vigas lets himself loose and encourages the organic violence of forms that are in line with his emotional improvisation.
Vigas’ work, within the Venezuelan mainstream plastic scene that was deeply tied to novelty and affiliated to technology and kinetics through its strong experimental and kinetic currents is atypical. Vigas never was attracted by such currents, which in some way represent a Venezuelan "official art", and which structured Venezuela’s artistic image in the international arena.
Vigas has opposed stubbornly to the notion of progress involving these trends with the notion of self development in an authentic and harmonious life of forms that cannot occur within the particular destiny of each artist. So he has made that every period of his work appears from the previous one by a formal and expressive need and, in turn, serve as a platform for the following: between them and others, in addition, there is no linear progression, not just a simple going forward, but often retraces over his steps and retakes an attitude and a subject under other points of view, of course, according it to the claim of his new experiences.
This is why the work of Vigas, like a human body, has feet, body and head, but also development and maturity and also, resemblance with his own paths. It belongs to the professional normalcy. Like any normal being, he has likes, desires and selective vocation, but has no obsessions. He tries to reconcile rather than to break. His conflicts are short; they are never really dramatic and end up again in fraternal situations.
His work is being run by a healthy spirit, a strong visual honesty and the generous idea of providing the plastic materials he uses, with qualities of warmth and feelings. Vigas achieves this purpose by implementing his relentlessly working method, often well resolved and always sensitive and vibrant.