The European Experience

1952 – 1964

“I have never been rigorously abstract nor rigorously figurative.
What I have always tried to be is rigorously Oswaldo Vigas.”
Oswaldo Vigas, 1958

Paris was still the capital of the art world in the 1950s, and every young artist wanted to live the experience of modernism firsthand. Having won the Venezuelan National Visual Arts Award, Vigas embarked on a major, new life experience: residency in Paris. He established his studio in the Latin Quarter, where he became a key player in the city’s legendary avant-garde scene and engaged with many of the era’s most important artists, movements, and ideas. A frequent participant in the prestigious Salon de Mai, Vigas socialized and showed work alongside Jean Arp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Wifredo Lam, Fernando Leger, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, and Roberto Matta, among others. In 1955 Vigas met Pablo Picasso in the south of France, an encounter that strengthened Vigas’s belief in the ethos of modernity, for which the Spanish artist was a conspicuous spokesperson. Then, in 1962, Vigas took part of the most important Parisian exhibition of Latin American art to date, at the Musée D´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, along with Berni, Lam, Matta, Tamayo, Toledo, and others.

Involved with all the artistic trends then in vogue, Vigas began to adapt what he needed to tie into his own visual vocabulary-- incorporating constructivism and geometry into American and pre-Columbian imagery, for example, while maintaining an organic feel for abstraction. As he began to produce more linearly structured works—the result of a new, innovative synthesis of forms-- Vigas continued to represent nature in his compositions. Allusions to bugs, plants, and other fauna and flora can be seen in the sharp shapes—e.g., the serrated jaws of a bizarre creature-- that infuse the images with implied violence.

Travel between Paris and North and South America during this period allowed Vigas to develop increasing interest in the New York scene. He became interested in the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, and several other American artists, while at the same time being asked to show his work in important U.S. exhibitions. During the same period Vigas was invited by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva to participate in his Integration of the Arts project at the campus of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, a mid-1950s masterpiece of urban planning that fused architecture with several of the other arts, and which was eventually declared (in 2000) a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

At the end of the 1950s and beginning of the ‘60s Vigas liberated his artistic practice from a reliance on abstraction and other formal structures then in fashion, and focused on the driving force of emotions, the substance of his materials, and the very act of painting. Texture, movement, and gesture allowed Vigas to engage some of the very forces that were said to be driving abstractionism: chiefly, the primal, the spiritual, and the metaphysical. Though venturing often beyond figuration, Vigas did not detach himself completely from figures, and still  frequently emulated animals and other beasts, as informalism and Expressionism took hold of his imagination and set the course for the next decade of his work.

After living and working in Paris for twelve years, Vigas returned to Venezuela in 1964. This was a decade that saw Vigas returning to his roots and reflecting on identity, and sometimes evoking, in his work, the art made by children-- studies in color and emotion that incorporate dramatically strong lines, with formal and conceptual characteristics that would accompany the artist along the rest of his artistic path.

Text
Susana Benko
Amalia Caputo