The Museo de Bellas Artes gets filled with witches and vermins.
By: Jazmín Lolas E.
Las Últimas Noticias
Santiago de Chile, Chile. January, 2015
Oswaldo Vigas used to explain his work, as he was telling a mythological story to a huge audience, saying for example that the main purpose of his paintings was “to establish a certain balance in the chaos of creation”.
When the artist talked about all the diffuse characters present in his paintings, he explained that he believed that “all these beings, plants and vermins must have been together in another time, being part of an entire body, and by putting them into the painting, I only try to reunite what never should have been separated”.
Born in Venezuela in 1926, Vigas who lived for 88 years and passed away on April 2014, dedicated all of his existence to art, a craft he never learned formally. He kept working even until he was an elderly man, declaring once in an interview made at his studio in Caracas just few month of becoming 80 years old, that at that moment of his life his main ambition was to keep on painting. His wish was granted for almost ten more years.
The exhibition shows for the first time in Chile the author’s masterpieces, and gathers paintings and sculptures that present the most important characters of his work.
The artists’ production which is bulky and diverse (besides painting, Vigas ventured also into sculpturing, engraving, tapestry, ceramics and mural technique), is preserved in different private collections and by the Foundation that he personally was in charge of driving and that bears his name.
In order to help diffuse Vigas’ heritage, the Vigas Foundation took the initiative to organize the traveling exhibition that started its journey in Perú and that is displayed this afternoon for the first time in Chile at the Museo de Bellas Artes, gathering approximately 50 works that include sculptures and tapestries.
Vigas described himself as “neither a rigorously abstract nor a rigorously figurative” painter, giving more emphasis to either current depending in the creating stage where he was at, something, that inspired by Columbian cultures and African ritual manifestations, helped him develop a very colorful style.
Bélgica Rodríguez, curator of the exhibition, explains that Vigas “was a figurative artist in his own way. His paintings, which reflect the American continent, never belonged to the academic field, but rather were able to be expressed through a language that pretended to be universal, and is the spectator’s challenge to translate from different perspectives the stains, the thick color strokes and the rhythm of lines and gestures on the canvas”.
The exhibition comprises between 1943 and 2013, and focuses on the most important characters throughout Vigas’ artistic path: The Witches; figures that were always present on the various phases of his career and which were influenced by ancestral images associated to sexuality and fertility.
Even though Vigas developed different themes all along his Works, Bélgica Rodríguez explains that “the Witch is the one that strikingly dominates his scenes”. “Vigas arranged the visuality of his paintings around the witches forms, a theme that first started to appear on his paintings on the 1940s and then became an extraordinarily strong motif during the 1950s. In 1952 he won the Fine Arts National Award with his work ‘The Great Witch’, a painting that was made the previous year”.
Promotion subject
“Oswaldo Vigas is a renown master of Latin American contemporary art history, even though not as famous as Wilfredo Lam or Roberto Motta, who were part of the surrealism movement; a movement that provided them other forms of promotion”, says Bélgica Rodríguez, curator of the Venezuelan painter’s retrospective exhibited at the Museo de Bellas Artes.
The exhibition will then travel to cities of Colombia, Panamá, Brazil and the United States of America.