The universe of Oswaldo Vigas hits São Paulo
María Angelina Castillo Borgo
El Nacional
Caracas, Venezuela. April 4th, 2016
The anthology brings together works by the artist, produced between 1943 and 2013. Researchers from the Amsterdam CoBrA Museum participated in the curatorial and the design of the exhibition.
It was a rediscovering of Oswaldo Vigas. The work of the artist, born in Valencia in 1926, returned to Brazil after a first contact in the second Biennial of Sao Paulo in the early 50s. The powerful colors of his paintings, the mystery of his ancestral universe, the bodies that depict figure and abstraction, dialogue once again with the viewer at the stunning Oswaldo Vigas Anthological 1943 - 2013 exhibition which opened Saturday at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. The traveling exhibition which arrived from a tour that has gone through the Latin American cities of Colombia, Chile and Peru; will then continue to the north of the American continent.
The morning began with a conference that was attended by Hugo Segawa, former director of MAC; Imre Jovak and Katja Weitering, guest curators of the CoBrA Museum of Modern Art of Amsterdam; the filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas; Venezuelan curator Belgica Rodriguez, the Polish Marek Bartelik, president of the International Association of Art Critics and the Brazilian researcher Lisbeth Rebollo.
Attendees who occupied all the chairs arranged for the conference had the opportunity to listen in various languages to the anecdotes and analysis of someone who was able to experiment with techniques and styles. "In the development of his work there are important chapters, so for this exhibition we wanted to do something radical: not a chronological tour, but to define the reasons that comprised his work. This opened my eyes to the legacy of a man who was obsessed with making art, one of the most important modern creators", Weitering said.
When it was the turn of Rodríguez, the researcher reminded Venezuela: "In this painful moment, after so many years of sadness for our cultural environment, this becomes an insufflation of fresh air; we have a tiny light which I hope can bring us again the opportunity to be leaders in museums and international presence", she added. The applause of a public in a country with discontent seconded her. Just the day before, a concentration near the Museum of Art of São Paulo called for the resignation of the current government.
At the end of her words, it was time to enter the huge rectangular space on the second floor of the MAC, where everything takes on meaning: 63 paintings and 5 sculptures that are distributed in 4 small rooms. Young couples, families and older people walked throughout the place that ends up in a projection room, in which the short documentary Renovación en el origen, which portrays the life of the man of the brujas was being projected. It was a large audience that chose the exhibition of Vigas among 16 other openings that took place in the city that same day.