Oswaldo Vigas

1926

Born in Valencia, Venezuela - 1924

Died Caracas, Venezuela - 2014

1942 to 1951
Presents his first works. Receives his first recognitions, 1943, Honor medal from Arturo Michelena Hall. 1951, Finishes his medical studies at Universidad Central de Venezuela. Receives The Lastenia Michelena Award At The Arturo Michelena Hall.

1952
Receives The National Plastic Art Prize, The John Boulton Prize, The Arturo Michelena Prize. Presents his first exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts
Began his work in Paris, France.

1953
Began courses at the L'Ecole des Beaux Arts and Sorbonne University
Joins Carlos Raúl Villanueva with five murals at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Presents his exhibitions at the Salon de Mai, Salon Réalités Nouvelles and Avoir Donner in Paris, France.

1954
A collective exhibit is presented at the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France with the participation of Léger, Arp, Bloch, Laurens, Pevsner, Lobo, Vasarely, Vigas.
With the patronage of the Smithsonian Institute, a group of exhibitions is presented in different cities of the United Sates.
Represents Venezuela at the Venice Biennial.

1955
Represents Venezuela at the Sao Paulo Biennial.
Presents an individual exhibition at the Pittsburgh Carnegie International Center.
Meets Pablo Picasso.

1956
An individual exhibit is presented at the Galerie La Roue, Paris, France.
In a collective exhibition at the Houston Museum receives a prize by Cundo Bermudez and Armando Morales.

1957
Presents an individual exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Madrid, Spain.
Receives the Puebla de Bolívar Award in Caracas, Venezuela.

1958
Appointed as Cultural Attaché in the Venezuelan Embassy.
Presents exhibitions in Bogotá, Colombia; Nebraska and the Art Institute of Chicago.

1961
Presents individuals exhibitions at Galerie La Rue and Galerie Neufville, Paris, France.

1962
Joins a collective exhibition at the Venezuelan-Israeli Institute of New York,; Galerie La Ruoue: Galerie Neufville; Galerie Creuze, Rabat Museum and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Is appointed Commissary at the Venice Biennial.

1964
Receives for the second time the Arturo Michelena Award.
Presents his first Engraving exhibition.

1967-1972
Resides in Caracas, Venezuela.
Collective exhibitions are presented in Caracas.

1973-1977
Presents his first exhibition of tapestry.
Presents his work at the Latin-American Art Biennial in Colombia where he receives the Honor Award.

1978
Presents his works at the Salon de Mai, Paris, France; Durban Gallery, Caracas and other collective exhibitions.

1979-1982
An individual exhibition at the National Art Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela is presented. Galería Venezuela, París, France. Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas, Venezuela. Christie's, New York, USA.

1983-1989
His first individual exhibition of bronze is presented at the Durban Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela. Collective exhibition at the opening of the Bolivarian Museum, Santa Marta Colombia. Collective participation at Sotheby's, New York, USA.
A work of Vigas is given to President François Mitterrand during his official visit to Caracas, Venezuela.

1990-1995
Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas, paints, sculptures, tapestry and drawings. A book written by Gaston Diehl is released.
Latin American Today Drawings at the San Diego Museum.
Latin American Masters, Boston, USA.
Awarded with the Prince Rainier III Prize.
Museum La Monnaie, Paris, France presents an individual exhibition.
Galerie Corinne Timsit, Paris, France. Galerie La Tour des Cardinaux, Paris, France.

1996-1999
Sotheby's, New York, USA.
FIA 97, Caracas, Venezuela. Art Miami 98 with the Aldo Castillo Gallery (Chicago, USA)
Four Latin American Artists, New York, USA. Art Festival of Biarritz, France

2000
One Heart, One World, itinerant exhibition through France, USA, Vietnam, Australia, Brazil and Japan.
Individual exhibition at the Miura Museum of Tokyo.
FIA 2000

2001
FIA 2001 with Aldo Castillo Gallery.

Eduardo Planchart Licea

Art for Oswaldo Vigas fills every moment of his life; in it there are the dimensions that reveal his many sources of inspiration, among which are his love for conversation, music, reading and cooking. Among these activities spring from his imagination spontaneous sketches that, in the near future, will become works that will be subjected to his critical look for days, weeks and sometimes years. Some paintings are lucky to flow more easily than others, when the artist captures the drawing in charcoal on the bare canvas he senses the difficulty he will find upon arrival at one of the most difficult stages of every creator: knowing when the work is completed.

"My ideal would be that this spontaneous work of the sketch had already the definite proportions of the paintings, so I would not have to intervene the rational that inevitably tries to be imposed and often betray us."
(Oswaldo Vigas)

Each piece is born from sketches that Vigas constantly creates, it is interesting to note the fluidity with which the artist makes them on any support he has at his fingertips, from paper coasters to a restaurant napkin or Metro tickets. Many of them are colored at birth and when it is so, as Vigas would say, "they are so much not on the tightrope. " This does not happen with the sketches that are just lines because they are still on the razor's edge.

This way of finding the sought has some parallelism with the Eastern philosophy of Zen or the neo-Platonic of ideas. While we could say that Socrates’ maieutics achieved, with his constant questions about the seemingly obvious, give birth to truths; Vegas gives birth to forms inspired in his creative mythology, which he has been materialized for decades.

"Every day I am more convinced that the most important acquisition in Contemporary Art is that it has opened the way to the archaic past. When you get into one of those prehistoric caves, touching the walls with your hands makes you relive those moments etched into the rock. Going back thousands of years, and that is present, not past. Each pictorial gesture is a repetition of an archaic act, and that is before spoken language. The hand knows more than the reason. "(Oswaldo Vigas)

For the painter the quest for the ancestral is an eternal present, one of the fundamental sources that feed his work. This dimension has strong symbolic significance, hence the variety and breadth of his taste, which includes pre-Hispanic art, popular, Mayan art, Inca and his special love for African art; all live in his conception of taste without any contradiction with Oriental art- especially Japanese that he collects with passion- and the most varied trends of modern and contemporary art.

To enter into his visual speech is useful to keep this universality and eclecticism of their culture, because there arise from them seeds from which his paintings, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics and engravings are born, producing a spell that traps the novice spectator and delights the knower in museums and galleries around the world where he has presented his work.

The aesthetic impact stems from a delicate balance between his intellectual and spiritual freedom, between the rational and irrational aspects present in each and every one of his pieces, hence so when he wins the National Arts Prize in 1952, with the Great Witch, he will renew our intellectual and artistic world and, provocatively, will begin to occupy a central place in the national art, splitting our cultural and intellectual world. His witches, recreated in a personal language, are rooted in the visual archaeological investigation of central Venezuela. Since this is the decade that Venezuela was under the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez (1948-1958), with a repressive control over the entire Venezuelan society. However, this did not prevent the enriching controversy between trends staged by characters of the height of Miguel Otero Silva, who was one of his earliest supporters against his detractors.

There was such concern in the artist to seek for his roots, that in the fifties, he goes to the Guajira, where he finds a still neglected dimension of Latin American art: the facial and textile designs of the Wayuu culture, characterized by subtle geometric structures. This interest is typical of a generation and a continent that was to meet its cultural and spiritual essence. As a result, in the fifties, in our art, there gather around the Free Art Workshop of Caracas, Alirio Oramas, Oswaldo Vigas, Mario Abreu, Guillermo Meneses, Juan Liscano, Alejo Carpentier, Oswaldo Trejo, Manuel Trujillo, Rhazes López Hernández, Antonio Estévez, etc. Elsewhere in the continent such as Mexico, is amidst the splendor of the works of Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco and Rufino Tamayo, in Ecuador expands Oswaldo Guayasamín’s figuration, in Colombia Alejandro Obregon and Enrique Grau, in Peru we find Fernando de Szyszlo and in Brazil, the muralism of Candido Portinari dazzles. The work of Oswaldo Vigas is central in this movement in Latin America, that in Venezuela, was overshadowed by the enthusiasm for the geometric abstractionism, expressed by a group of national artists finding in Paris, the so called "Academy of abstract art" of Vasarely, Dewasne and Pillet, and later by the known boom of kinetics.

The Valencian artist's visual language is reaffirmed again in his 2005 and 2006 work. However, we could say that in these years there is a chromatic inversion in his pictorial language by emphasizing the relationship between drawings and color. Often the line, like an abyss, delimits vigorously the inside from the outside, as an expressive metaphor of the dualities of existence. Both in substance and in form, the grays or the raw material, which dominated earlier periods, disappear, to give life to greens, reds and yellows, colors of the tropics. It is the bustle of life, characteristic of Caribbean culture that becomes present.

Characters emerge, dominated by a line that creates tension with the bare canvas, and the as spots are born, they begin to sprout atmospheres that have a musical sense by the developed harmonies. Each one of these paintings has its own universe, with emotional loads transmitted by the artist realizing his visual language.

The color line has a chromatic character and, therefore, it not only defines but assumes different depths in its isolation. These strokes have unpredictable features for their rythm, such as in The Fall, (2005), the stroke remains firm over multicolored bodies and in vertical sense, surrounded by a green background that contrasts with red of the faces openings, transformed into surprising visual centers. These small red spots have such a presence in this branching of beings that become fissures that filter life, and is in these openings that the inner world of the beings comes out, these bodies are full of textures that enhance their expressiveness.

Several of the paintings created by Vigas, between the late 2005 and 2006, have totemic features and a configuration which seeks the ascent, turning these characters into cosmic navels seeking to rebuild a visual synthesis that projects the paradoxes that grip humanity In the new millennium, when he has lost the certainty in the foundations of his conception of progress and development. This is perceived in these paintings when the deconstruction and rupture of the characters, typical of the imaginary painting, they are dominated by gravitational movement that focuses on itself.

The last decade of Vegas in Venezuela is characterized, similarly, by a process of de-fragmentation and the management of simplifying dualisms that deny the common sense as guide of action, these are the features that are also present in this figuration from his drawings of the nineties, as evidenced by the series of characters where the organs are exchanged, the body parts, apart from being deformed, are re-signified. So we are before characters whose faces are dominated by the phallic, means through which the artist presents a humanity dominated and manipulated by the sexual. This trend is accentuated in his figuration with the arrival of the new millennium. Beings dominated by inversion create dramatic situations, it is possible to find vagina-shaped mouths, phallic noses, behinds in place of brain... Resources to confront the spectator with a beating beauty that creates a revealing visual discourse of the artist's inner vision about humanity.

The triangle, crescent, fire, vertical and horizontal, are also present in several of these paintings in which these inorganic forms are transformed into organic geometry appear to relate to the Paraca Incan art , as seen in the wings of some birds of these textiles designs and made up of feathers of triangles.

Other paintings are characterized by their free-form and playful deformation, as in Composition with figures and animals, 2005 and Stranger, 2006, are perceived by the spectator as a spot to which sense is transmitted to it by projecting the external dimension into the interior . Among the pieces dominated by strong colors Solar Figures, 2006 stands out, where he mingles the human and the animal in a personal and organic geometry.

We are before an art language that creates a bridge between the diverse perceptive levels of reality and the searches an even deeper understanding of our soul. Thus, challenging the spectator to investigate these basic forms to reveal its secrets. Therefore, it is not enough to just see them but it is necessary to look at them with attention. This artist’s feature is linked to his passion for the symbolic; that is why in his work each piece is a formal whirlwind where is present a figuration that searches multiplicity and denies uniqueness. Therefore, he distances himself from reality in his thematic, to create his own visual paradigms, which are a contribution to the history of Venezuelan art. An example is the theme of eternal feminine in his work, his zoology and anthropomorphic characters, motifs that are made with the certainty that man is primarily creative. In the horizontal paintings, in landscape design, Vigas avoids isolated figures by creating clusters of beings of various types, consistent with his zoology and fantastic anthropomorphism, like dogs without a head, the snakes that hide its forms, and the human bodies reassembled in a symbolic anatomy reborn in every spectator to rediscover herself.

"Painting has made me more human, because I think the value of a man is in direct proportion to what he can contribute to the discovery of the enigmas of the being." (Oswaldo Vigas)

Caracas, Venezuela
February 2006

Oswaldo Vigas has one of the most solid and successful trajectories of contemporary Venezuelan and Latin-American plastic art. He excelled in painting, sculpture, ceramics, engraving

Read more: Oswaldo Vigas

Conversation with Oswaldo Vigas
Mariela Provenzali

Thursday August 2, 2007
Resonancias.org

How did your first inclination toward art manifest?
In Elementary school. I was doing theater, and always in the plays- mostly comedies- I was missing the atmosphere, and since they saw me drawing, they asked me to participate in the realization of the backdrops. But my first works were gouaches on paper and I painted my first oil paintings on pieces of canvas of an old cot.

When did you present your first exhibition?
In 1942 I sent illustrations to poems by Arthur Machado, Maria Clemencia Camaran and others, to the First Hall of illustrated Poems at the Ateneo of Valencia. One day they called me to come and receive the first prize. I was sitting in the back row, and when my name was called, I got up. While walking I heard people whispering because I was still wearing short pants.

When did you sell your first work?
Dr. Jorge Lizárraga bought, in 1942, two works. I seem to recall "Flower and Shapes" and "Church of Guacara" semi-abstract paintings with surreal elements.

Which was the most important influence in your creative activity?
The great masters that I learned about later in valuable books at Luis Eduardo Chavez’s library in Valencia. But I had a lot of works done in small formats. The first things I drew and painted were absolutely spontaneous ... People said that I could not paint because what I did resembled nothing.

Having painted for years in an intuitive way, I created my own academy, drawing male and female nudes, faces, bodies, self-portraits, portraits of my mother, brothers and of course, landscapes and still lives. When I arrived in Paris, I enrolled in the School of Fine Arts, in the workshop of lithography and engraving directed by Marcel Jaudon and then at the Stanley William Halter one.

In what media and at what times do you express yourself more freely?
Drawing, and when I'm not overwhelm with responsibilities, which happens especially during my travels. In those moments I do drawings on any media: paper tablecloths, napkins, metro tickets, newspaper ... There is no retention in crumbly materials, the worst material have the advantage of not producing any psychological resistance in the artist. The new papers offer resistance because they are a white and clean surface; one senses that one can spoil it. However, in a piece of newspaper one does not have that problem, one can scrawl it as one pleases , and sometimes one can do good things, and it has the advantage that it does not get moldy thanks to the inks, although it can become yellow. Famous painters have made beautiful oil paintings on newspaper and glue them on canvas later.

From these drawings he made spontaneously, he later took them up again for paintings, engravings, sculptures or ceramics. I do not believe in "evolution" in art, I have never a continuous line, I go forward and then backwards, from one side to the other...

How is a day in the life of Vigas?
I hate routine. I do not believe in discipline and inspiration. I never wait for inspiration to do the things that are to done with work rather than inspiration.

I do not paint every day, only when I can and when I feel like it, and when I am not doing anything else, like cooking, for example.
I get up as late as possible because the problems start when you out of bed ...everything gets complicated when one gets up. I love to sleep; I think that is the best you have. I dream, but not much and I only remember the transcendental dreams. Every day is like the beginning and looks like the end. But there is no rule; the only rule is that there is no rule, no discipline. Work is not unpleasant because it is libidinal, it is the libido which intervenes and gives pleasure even when you suffer. It is pleasant.

I see that you enjoy cooking and preparing bitter orange marmalade, how did you learn to make it?
Like painting, making it, working on it, painting is learned by doing.

How has been the relationship with the artists with whom you have shared?
Arriving in Caracas, in 1948, I looked for a place to live near the School of Fine Arts and the University. I found a boarding house on Fe to Santa Barbara where there lived Humberto Jaimes Sánchez, Angel Hurtado, Omar Carreño, Victor Valera and Genaro Moreno: they were my first friends in Caracas.

I have had very dear friends. We made a trio Angel Hurtado, Jaime Sanchez and I at the Free Art Workshop. Alirio Oramas, who ran it, was the one that took me there. They were also Mario Abreu, Luis Guevara Moreno, Regulo Perez and others.

What have been the most important moments in your artistic life?
In 1951 I obtained a degree as doctor and the following year I received the National Fine Arts Prize the Boulton Prize and the Arturo Michelena Prize.

We know you met with great artists during your stay in Paris. Who are the ones you remember the most?
Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Jean Arp, Alberto Magnelli, Baltasar Lobo, Alfred Mannessier, Jean Dewasne, Victor Vasarely, some of them, by the way, were presented to me by my dear and admired friend, architect Carlos Raul Villanueva.

As for Picasso, it was the pianist Humberto Castillo Suarez, who took and introduced me to him in 1955 in his house "La Californie" in Cannes. It was a human encounter of remarkable empathy, of more of all artistic and pictorial consideration. He treated me as a colleague; he wanted to learn about my work and asked my opinion on what he was painting and his work. It was an exceptional moment in my life. I saw him for three straight days and when we parted we both cried. He made me promise him that I would come back, which I could never do for reasons too long to explain here.

And Reverón?
I met him before I left Venezuela, when I visited him with the friends of the Free Art Workshop and Rafael Lopez Pedraza. I remember he put his fingers in my ears telling me I had to take out the bugs I could have in the head, which tormented him. Angel Hurtado took pictures of that encounter.

In this conversation we have had during these days I've discovered that you write poetry. When does it start writing?
Since I was a teenager. I've always written: many essays, newspaper articles, poetry and even plays.

Well Master, the only thing you lack is singing or playing a musical instrument ...
But I am a music lover, I like music and joy it a lot. As a child I began to study piano at the Ateneo of Valencia; I had to drop it because I had no instrument. My favorite composer is Chopin, but I love Mozart, Bach. Beethoven, Prokofiev, Moussorgsky, Stravinsky ...

Life has brought me closer to great musicians like Jean Pierre Rampal, Narciso Yepes, Byron Janis, Yoyo Ma, Henryck Szeryng, Maurice Hasson, my buddy, not forgetting Krzysztof Penderecki with whom I keep a great relationship. Krzysztof started a "Quartet for Oswaldo" in my studio in 1987, watching my series of oil paintings on the crucifixion.

This simple and emotional conversation, of spontaneous questions and answers in the artist's home, went on quietly in the fascinating atmosphere of his studio, full of smells and colors, where we selected the works presented in this exhibition.

Author: Mariela Provenzali
©Copyright Oswaldo Vigas