Today Artists: Oswaldo Vigas
J.J. Tharrats
Revista Barcelona. May, 1957
We can imagine that Venezuela is in full artistic and spiritual boom after seeing these extraordinary photographs of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas published by major European and American architecture magazines. Maybe these splendid mosaics by Fernand Léger, these vigorous sculptures by Laurens, these harmonics murals by Vasarely or these magical ceilings by Calder constitute, for the moment, the only compelling example that can offer Venezuelans, but as an example, as a departing point into other forceful embodiments, the achievements in the University City of Caracas is a lot. As a matter of fact, we have always believed that poverty is not a good counselor for artists.
A higher economic sake, a flourishing industrial wealth must correspond also with a renewed creative impulse from the best artists of the moment. The great masterpieces of painting and sculpture that mark the most significant stages of the history –as of the history of architecture-, have emerged almost always on request. The artist can rarely occur in isolation, can do without the society or the historical circumstances that surround him. Therefore, countries called to dominate artistically are also those whose economic strength is on the lead. Venezuela and the United States may be the Greece or Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.
Among the best Venezuelan artists of the moment we want to highlight Oswaldo Vigas, a painter whose work surprised us in the Third Hispano American Biennial and that currently presents an anthology of his young but already abundant production in the exhibition hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Madrid. Oswaldo Vigas was born in Valencia (Venezuela) in 1926, has won six painting awards in his country and has won another important award given by the Museum of Houston (Texas-USA). The artist exhibits his work since 1953 at the Salon de Mai in Paris and has represented Venezuela at the Carnegie International Painting in Pittsburg, at the Biennials of São Paulo, Venice and Latin American, and so on. He has painted for the Ciudad Universitaria of Caracas a wall decoration of almost one hundred forty square meters. He lives in Paris since 1952, having made a few months ago in the gallery "La Roue" of the French capital, an exhibition that has won praise from some of the most authoritative critics.
The Art of Oswaldo Vigas is marked with those totemic accents and with that chromatic violence that seem to be the soul of the most expressive and passionate paintings of a Portinari, a Tamayo, a Matta, a Peláez or a Wifredo Lam. On their manly colored surfaces, the juxtapositions of inks and materials are broken by black lines, sometimes sharp, sometimes mordant that the artist lavished with the same biological insistence that made the primitive man from Central America record, on the hard stone, those religious or cabalistic signs that summarizes maybe an entire event or a whole lifetime. Oswaldo Vigas tells us that these petrographies sometimes appear in the most inaccessible places, on completely impregnable rocks, in caves with towering vaults almost covered by water, in which man could easily scratch those ceilings from boats floating on now disappeared lakes. This is why, that from a compelling ancestral mandate, Vigas seems to sum up in his painting the concept advocated by Torres-Garcia, the idea of “making a virgin art, but penetrated by the essences of every land and ending up with the unification within the greatest diversity of all the art of the continent”