Oswaldo Vigas: Coming into the light as his country descends into darkness

Two current exhibits at the Orlando and Tampa Museums of Art are both focused on elevating artist profiles. I have written previously on Orlando Museum's exhibit Louis Dewis: The Resurrection of a Belgian Post-Impressionist. The Tampa Museum exhibit Oswaldo Vigas Transformations (January 31, 2019 - May 27, 2019) is part of a broader campaign to introduce the works of the Venezuelan artist to an audience beyond his native country and the Latin American arts community. The campaign is spearheaded by a foundation formed by the artist's son and widow for that express purpose.

Oswaldo Vigas was born in 1923 in Valencia, Venezuela, the son of a local doctor. He began painting at the age of 12 but entered Central University of Venezuela to study Pediatrics. His love of art won out, however, and he began to take his calling more seriously. He won the Venezuelan Fine Arts Prize in 1952 and utilized the ticket that was a part of the prize to travel to Paris and enroll in the prestigious École des Beaux Arts.

Vigas resided in Paris for 12 years and, while there, was an active member of the avant-garde art scene with friends such as Wilfredo Lam, Rufino Tamayo, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso. During that time, some of his pieces were a part of a group show at the 1954 inauguration of the Venezuelan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and, in 1962, he was selected to participate in the first exhibition of Latin American art at the Musée d'Art Moderne.

Vigas returned to Venezuela in 1964 and spent the remainder of his life there, continuing to paint, heading up the Art Department of the University of the Andes, and creating a film school. While primarily known for his painting, Vigas branched into sculptures, tapestries, printmaking, and ceramics during the 1970s and 80s.

Oswaldo Vigas

Vigas' art was inspired by:

• Venezuela's pre-Columbian and African cultural patrimony
• European and American modernism
• The great masters of western art, to include Pablo Picasso, Paul Gaugin, and Paul Cézanne.

His styles ranged over Surrealism, Cubism, Figuration, Abstraction, Constructivism, Informalism, and Neo-Figuration. Today his art can be found in private collections as well as in prestigious institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Art Museum of the Americas.

Vigas died in 2014 at the age of 90.

A selection of the paintings included in the exhibit is shown below. In my view, the works done before his travel to Paris is simply stunning. According to the exhibition notes,

Oswaldo Vigas achieved success early in his career with imaginative abstractions and provocative figurative paintings. Depictions of women remained constant throughout his work and appeared as mythical forms in the guise of muses and idols. Vigas' admiration of pre-Columbian artifacts ... inspired his acclaimed series of Bruja (or Witch) paintings. ... This important suite of paintings, with its homage to the past yet anchored in modernism, established Vigas as one of Venezuela's most significant artists in the 1950s.

Composition with Blue Bird, 1942

Composition IV, 1944

Three Figures in Yellow (The Three Graces), 1948

Study for Dancer, 1950

Little Witch, 1951

Infant Witch, 1951

The below paintings "represent Vigas' vested interest in Venezuela's native traditions and landscape."

The curvilinear forms in Yare reference the colorful masks during the Dancing Devils of Yare, a traditional festival held in San Francisco de Yare, Venezuela, during the Feast of Corpus Christi. The Scorpion illustrates Vigas' approach to the organic forms of flora and insects.

Yare, 1952

Vestal, 1953

The Scorpion, 1952

The influence of the circles within which he moved while in Paris is evidenced by his shift away from "narrative figuration to structural compositions of interlocking forms and intersecting linear lines."

Project for Mural in Orange II, 1954

Two Nascent Characters in Yellow, 1953

Project for Mural in Green, 1953

Project for Mural, VI, 1953

Composition in Gray, 1954

His works in the early 1960s were influenced by his exposure to Zen Buddhism:

He filled his canvasses with spontaneous brushwork and layered color to create vibrant textured paintings.

Germination II, 1960

Germination III, 1960

Stone Sky, 1960

Megatú, 1962

Prayer, 1963

Vigas returned to Venezuela in 1964 and his work in those early return years lay at the intersection of figurative and abstract art.

Playfull, 1966

Solar, 1967

Oswaldo working on Solar

In the 1970s he approached figurative abstraction with a new dramatic form:

In his early works, static figures anchored the paintings. Here, the body appears to stretch across the composition as if in motion. ... He used contrasts between light and dark, as well as overlapping oblique shapes, to disrupt the picture plane. The past and present collide in these works as Vigas pays homage to Venezuela's pre-Columbian past and mythologies with a spirited modernist sensibility.

Appeared Blue, 1976

Blue Character, 1975

Oswaldo Vigas is world-class artist with a stellar body of work whose only sin is that he plied his trade in the Southern Hemisphere, beyond the gaze of the art cognoscenti. He painted across a number of styles but I was especially drawn to the fluidity, inventiveness, innovativeness, and color combinations of his figurative work which seemed less hemmed-in and monochromatic than his more abstract pieces.

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