Late life

2004 - 2014

“Every day I’m more convinced that the most important
achievement of contemporary art is the opening of the
path toward the ancient past.”
Oswaldo Vigas, 2003

From the 1990s until the second decade of the 2000s, when he died, Vigas continued to paint women and ghostly beings, combined with elements from nature in all its organic vitality. His works represent a dazzling variety of diverse worlds and inventive narratives, expressed both through titles and the figures depicted. He worked from sketches, from which he transferred figures to the canvas. The results are paintings made with courage and an energy equivalent to the force of nature in transforming bodies and generating life.

The art critic Bélgica Rodríguez writes, “[Vigas presents] a universe transformed into lines, color, and space, which is the result of a strong symbolism, created initially by the primal stroke of abstraction; thus its meaning, as with all his work, can be perceived only by sensitivity to fundamental, universal values along with sensorial experiences that are connected by powerful intellectual mechanisms.” [1]

During his last decades Vigas embraced the writing of poetry, in a return to one of his earliest passions. As he described in his own words, “To be able to paint and write at the same time would be ideal. With the right hand to the left, to paint; and with the left to the right, to write a poem. Brushes as keys to open all locks, so words can escape from their cage.” [2]

When Vigas died in Caracas in 2014, at the age of 90, he was already unarguably considered to be one of the most important figures in Latin American art. He had constructed a personal language and unique cosmogony through experiment with a wide variety of media and ideas, and, of course, through exhaustive work. As the artist declared to his son, filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas, in the latter’s documentary film about his father, El vendedor de orquídeas (“The Orchid Seller”), “Art is everything. I believe in the kind of art that gets into everything, art that transcends. That is why art must not be pure-- it needs to be contaminated, as life.”

Text
Susana Benko
Amalia caputo


[1]González, Milagros. Interview with Bélgica Rodríguez on the occasion of the exhibition: Oswaldo Vigas Constructivist at the Ascaso Gallery, Wynwood. Venezuela al Día. Online newspaper, November 29, 2012.
[2]Vigas, O. “Mis Dioses Tutelares. Selection of Poems” Ed. Medici Gallery, October, 2007.