Return to the homeland

1964 – 2003

“Our continent is full of dark signs and warnings. Telluric signs, magic or exorcisms are deep components of our condition. At the same time that they reveal something; these symbols place and compromise us in a disturbing, volatile world…. The intention of my painting is to reach, interpret and translate these symbols into new warnings.”
Oswaldo Vigas, 1967

Vigas moved back to Mérida, Venezuela in 1964 and finally settled down in Caracas in 1970. His homecoming to Venezuela, while following the rich and various experience of Paris, marked the arrival of what art critics term Vigas’s neo-figurative period, in which beastlike figures of women and other totems haunt his canvases. This period is defined by the freedom in Vigas’s artistic practice to move between figuration and abstraction, as he constructs a private world of recurring elements, like his “witches” and other ludic creatures. Abstraction may dominate in this world, but figurative clues seem to reveal that the bodies of Vigas’s creatures have been formulated by way of both abstract and so-called primitive modes of expression.

Critics writing about this period have noted that in moving between figuration and abstraction Vigas reveals his true voice. Later, in the 1990s, Vigas would synthesize his motifs and introduce further changes into his work, liberating his painting and sculpture from structural formality and evincing his fascination with primitive gestures and early forms of expressive language.

Vigas’s work of the 1990s shows the same kind of spontaneity and free expression that Miró and Klee had strived for years earlier. Art critics Jean Clarence Lambert and Marek Bartelik connect Vigas’s work from this decade to the formal concerns of the avant-garde abstract expressionist Europeans, including Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, and Jean Dubuffet, whose works were experimental in nature and gave predominance to gesturalism, primitivism, spontaneity, and childlike drawing. Vigas was also impacted by Art Brut and especially by the work of its chief proponent, Jean Dubuffet, whose ideas challenged traditional notions of high culture, beauty, and good taste. These ideas were in perfect agreement with Vigas's preference for expression over what he acerbically called "well-done painting.”

This period was prolific for Vigas, a time characterized by maturity of the artist’s visual language and command of the personal vocabulary that he constructed and would continue to explore vigorously for the rest of his years.

Text
Susana Benko
Amalia Caputo