Oswaldo Vigas: CoBrA

OSWALDO

VIGAS

OSWALDO VIGAS A n to l ó g i c a 1 9 4 3 - 2 0 1 3 EDITORIAL DIRECTION

Fundación Oswaldo Vigas TEXTS

Marek Bartelik Jean-Clarence Lambert Susana Benko Bélgica Rodríguez EDITORIAL COORDINATION

Lorenzo Vigas Dilia Hernández ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Lisa Blackmore Gabriela Aguilar PHOTOGRAPHS

Renato Donzelli Eduardo Chacón Archivo Oswaldo Vigas GRAPHIC DESIGN

Zilah Rojas ISBN 978-980-7690-00-3 ©Fundación Oswaldo Vigas, 2015 ©Bélgica Rodríguez, 2015 Todos los derechos reservados

VIGAS

COBRA

JEAN-CLARENCE LAMBERT

The third part of my great book (great because of its format) CoBrA, un art libre (1983, reissued in 2008 with a preface by Alechinsky) is called CoBrA après CoBrA. This is, of course, about the individual development of the painters and sculptors of the CoBrA group, who had collectively exhibited for only three short years (1948-1953), every time under difficult conditions.

Every one for themselves then, but preserving and developing the essential thing that united them one time: the elaboration of imagined and imagining images, as I called them when I gathered them later (with many others of their contemporaries) in a large and wealthy imaginal kingdom (like in the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom). See my book Le règne imaginal, 1991 (2 volumes).

CoBrA came from the North of Europe: Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, hence the name (COBRA is an acronym coined by Christian Dotremont, the poet unifying the group). They worked with no relationship to what was then called the School of Paris, which was predominantly expressionist and / or abstract, at least in its more advanced options.

Among the CoBrA, the “wildest” were, without a doubt, the Danish, Asger Jorn and CH Pedersen - we just commemorated the centenary of Pedersen with a superb retrospective at the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum in Herning, Jutland (September 2014).

For the Dutch -especially the big three: Appel, Corneille, Constant-, being CoBrA meant challenging the academic education and ignoring the School of Paris as much as they could.

All sought elsewhere: the Danish, especially Jorn, in Viking art (if there is any...) and prehistoric art; the Dutch in Child Art (the childhood of art), folk art or extra European art. No aesthetic hierarchy or cultural bias: CoBrA wanted freedom in art. In society, too. Hence their political, or rather, sociopolitical engagement - but that’s another story.

Corneille, especially, went to meet the “other,” that is to say, the extra-European: Africa first, and then the rest of the world; America (just a short time in North America because of, let’s say, professional reasons: exhibitions, etc.), mostly Latin America, the Caribbean and the Far East. We have knoc-

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ked a lot together, Taiwan or Senegal, Morocco and Mexico, and Caracas, where we met for the CoBrA exhibition at the Sofia Imber Museum of Contemporary Art. We went back to Paris, our starting point, where Corneille and CoBrA finally had their main studio. We came together there. Our affinities played together there.

This is clearly present in the series of canvases Vigas painted successively: a built but sensible geometrism, from the time of Villanueva (the ornamentation for the University City of Caracas); the non matiériste figuration, which pleased our Donner à Voir fellows so much, Jean Jacques Leveque or Raoul Jean Moulin. Then, these tropical shapes he had within him, in the chiaroscuro of the unconscious. Vigas then found the means to let them live, within him and on the canvas. It is a kind of “return home.” As the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire would say: a neighbor. A geographical neighbor, but also one of lyrical vision...

CoBrA had what our industrial civilization forbids more: the access to deep images and original, dynamic archetypes, for the empty forms (dying or already dead) and the forced repetition, which are, largely, the custom of contemporary art.

I wrote about Corneille on L’œil de l’été. It seems just as suitable for Oswaldo Vigas when he brings up a very personal mythology... When he said: “Gather what never should have been separated. Restore some balance in the disorder of creation.”

I think that is the great challenge of his work: a nuevo mundo Orinoco - to cite another great Venezuelan, the poet Juan Liscano, who was our common and admired friend.

Dracy en Bourgogne, May 2014

These lines, dear Oswaldo, were supposed to be an “open letter” you would have received prior to my arrival in Caracas, which would have marked the half-century (or more...) of our friendship, our shared convictions. Sadly, as you wrote in a true and direct form in one of the poems of your book Regreso de la noche: El tiempo es más que la vida, es sobre todo la muerte que está en el tiempo escondida.

Time is more than life It is, above all, death, which is hidden in time What I wanted to tell you, or rather, to ask you, to ask us -it now concerns me that our twentieth century sank in the purgatory of history- is whether or not we have ruined freedom, the enormous freedom we achieved after World War II. You’re no longer able to respond this directly to me as you would have certainly done, because you were an artist who questioned the conditions of your own work all your life. Well, considering its many metamorphoses, all done, completed, experienced, I would say: “Yes! We have profited this freedom very well, especially you, and you. You Latin Americans!”

You invented a new culture now essential to our world.

As a French man, that is, an old European, I’m not proud of what Europe has become today, not really! However, from what we can call our “good deeds,” we promoted, we helped the formation and the cultural affirmation of Latin America! Particularly Paris, in the 50s, when you were there, when we met: when Paris was, I dare say, the capital, at least the great rendezvous of artists, poets and writers of Latin America.

That was half a century ago. Art was called “modern” in its ultimate conquering stage, despite its socio-cultural context and its quite detrimental and chaotic politics: the Cold War, the obscurantist dictatorships in Spain and Latin America (with the exception of Castro), the degeneration of the

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USSR and its unhappy satellite countries, the Freudo-Marxist pessimism... and the last flares of Surrealism.

The art that was in progress, in which you actively participated, had no place in museums and other public scenes. It had to step up to the scenario to be known, supported by avant-garde galleries: it was the work of those then called “art critics,” that is to say, “fellow” artists.

Thus, in the Gaston Diehl’s Salon de Mai (which each year changed place in Paris, just like our Donner a Voir), in the launch of the Biennale des Jeunes, the critics under the age of thirty-five (!!!) exhibited their favorite painters and sculptors.

You were present in both of these shows. Since then, the interest in your work has not weakened, as seen in many texts and testimonies that talked about the steps of your development, marked by great exhibitions where we met every time – with what a pleasure!

The Latin American artists were then into several big trends: the surrealistic, the geometric abstract, the kinetic “lumière et mouvement,” and, how to call them? “the ones influenced by Picasso,” just like you.

Let me explain myself: Picasso was the great deconstructor of the European tradition: “I have established the right to dare,” he said (he said it...!) Additionally, he was the one who showed, all hierarchies being abolished, how to integrate the non-European into contemporary art. This was, among other things, the bang (the brilliant audacity) for the Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Before you, like you, the Cuban Wifredo Lam was close to Picasso: the African forms (with which Lam had, besides, an atavistic relationship), came in his paintings.

For you, the process seems to have been quite similar, with this important singularity: you declared yourself a Caribbean, with clarity and responsibility; you did not work as a more or less exotic Western, but as an artist of the age when Europe did not claim any supremacy (colonial or another kind of supremacy), on the sometimes referred to as the anthropological Ages.

It was the 5Os, when you formed yourself in Paris, when the old Western

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humanism learned the value and the difference of “others,” those who had previously been called the wild ones... From then, the art of the wild ones came out of the ethnographic ghetto to be welcomed just like the “civilized” art... A truly fundamental movement, initiated by the Expressionists and Surrealists, then consecrated by Malraux’s Musée imaginaire.

For me, this was in all your work, and that’s what seduced me right away, when I saw it for the first time on Grégoire de Tours street, at the La Roue Gallery: could I have fallen a little in love with your Brujas? (They are no less than attractive!)

It was around this time when the exhibition L’art latino-américain à Paris was made, hosted (miraculously, remember) by the National Museum of Modern Art. I was the “general delegate” chosen by the organizing committee: Augusto Cárdenas (Cuba), Ronaldo De Juan (Argentina), Perán Ermini (Venezuela), Rodolfo Krasno (Argentina), Wifredo Lam (Cuba) Silvano Lora (Santo Domingo), Roberto Matta (Chile), Alicia Peñalba (Argentina), Artur Luis Piza (Brazil), Enrique Zanartu (Chile)...

It was from August 2 to October 4, 1962, and the 138 exhibitors got to know notability in the coming years. Poets and musicians were there for performances, concerts, and for controversy, too: it was the beginning of the Castro rebellion against the North American domination. There were so many visitors! As for me, I was there every day or nearly every day, and you were, too, with Krasno and the others... Today, I can say that it was an important stage in the recognition of the Latin American creativity: it was assembled in its profuse vitality like never before.

Instead of insisting on it, let me copy the last words of my preface to that catalog: “We see the general trend of this set of plastic works as we have already seen it in the wonderful literature, poetry, essay, novel. Down South the Rio Bravo, a determining creative adventure has begun.”

One that brought your work during the half century that followed. Oswaldo, let me tell you again how much I admire your work.

Dracy en Bourgogne, June 2014

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VIGAS

AND THE MODERN MASTER

Vigas and Guillaume Corneille (Cornelis van Beverloo) SUSANA BENKO

When you think about the painting of Guillaume Corneille, full of color, poetry and invention of creatures and bestiaries, it is easy to imagine why he and Oswaldo Vigas had a good friendship in Paris. The relationship between both artists was also due to an empathy for free expressions, to their passion for “primitive arts” (more precisely for the arts of Africa, Oceania and America), and, without a doubt, because both were poetry lovers.

Corneille never adjusted to the academic regulations of art schools. Vigas either. Before leaving Holland, Corneille was attracted to the paintings of Matisse and Picasso, to Surrealism. He especially liked the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. He adhered to experimental forms more and more, an interest he shared with another great Dutch artist, Karel Appel, who Vigas also had the chance to meet. With Appel and Constant, Corneille founded Reflex and the Experimental Group in Holland in 1948, but later that year, in Paris, they all made up the international movement CoBrA with other artists: the Danish Asger Jorn and the Belgian C. Dotremont, Pierre Alechinsky and J. Noiret. Its name refers to Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, hometowns of its members, who pushed an expressionist movement of international significance, closely linked to the current neofigurativism that began to be important in Europe and America. The CoBrA group lasted until 1951.

CoBrA was distinguished by basing their creative processes in an absolute spontaneity and freedom. It was a way to oppose the constructive trends, promoting a painting made with vehemence and courage. They were inspired by the art of their respective cultures (by children’s drawings, by prehistoric art), interests that Oswaldo Vigas also had. It is no wonder that such expressive and vital configuration of Vigas were influenced by archaic prehistoric forms. Many years later, as the subject of an interview, Vigas made important comments about this: “The basis of art is in prehistory. It begins with the man in the caves, in the grottos. That is where modern art begins.”

He thought it essential to understand his work from its links with the past: “the most atavistic, but the most remote past.” Understanding this concept also involves understanding the relationship between the art of CoBrA and Vigas with art brut and child art, manifestations that also have a common point: they are images that emerge from the immediacy of thought, without obstacles or pre-reasoning, as promoted by the Surrealists. Hence, their close connection with this movement. Also, they all especially appreciated the paintings by Jean Dubuffet and Wilhelm de Kooning, artists that some-

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how opened the pictorial guidelines for neofigurativism, which began to develop from the 50s.

The idea of an unbridled art appears in manifestations such as CoBrA’s. In Vigas, this happens especially in the paintings made from the 60s, after a brief but significant material and informal stage. We see this rampancy of gestures and color, with violent and spontaneous strokes, in works like Huella informe (1961), Cabeza gestual (1962), Diablo (1962), Géminis (1962), in his series Apparecientes of the same year, in his Cabezas, Formas espontáneas, and in series made in the middle of that decade: his Personagrestes, Maria Lionzas and other Señoras.

It is no coincidence that the French critic Jean Clarence Lambert said that Vigas’ painting represents the “Latin American CoBrA”. Precisely Lambert is one of the most diligent specialists in the painting of CoBrA. The comparison is not far-fetched, although it is true that they made their work at different times and circumstances. The art of Vigas is inserted in a Latin American neofigurativism, a movement that was originally related to CoBrA. However, there is one aspect that takes on special importance in Vigas’ case: the certainty and security of what he was doing. Vigas was not an artist of trends. He always remained very “Vigas”: an artist with very clear objectives, open to changes as he was with his own work, and always ready to be kind with those who, like Corneille, he had some spiritual and aesthetic empathy, like their shared passion for art, poetry and the archaic expressions from which the seeds of our Western culture sprout.

Caracas, 2014

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VIGAS INFORMALISTA

In his house in Caracas, Oswaldo Vigas remained creative until his very last days.

Paris 1959-1964 MAREK BARTELIK

This exhibition is his first individual show since he passed away, at the age of 90, on April 22, 2014. We may also call it his “first show”—not to suggest some kind of a causal break linked to this irreversible loss, but rather to stress his uninterrupted presence as a remarkable artist.1 One might argue, in fact, that for an individual as deeply committed to his practice and process as Vigas was during his life, each of his consecutive shows will remain a first one, for each represents the essence of his existence, which for the artist is making art. His drive to make art recalled that of great painters, such as Henri Matisse, who at an old age, continued to work even when confined to his bed, insisting: “Space has the boundaries of my imagination.”2 And, like the French master, Vigas had an imagination that was unquestionably boundless.

This exhibition is the second show at the Ascaso Gallery has devoted to a specific and distinct moment in his artistic career, this time to the years between 1959 and 1964, a period during which Vigas’s work achieved a new level of expressiveness, abstraction, and heterogeneity.3 Vigas’s paintings from that period reveal his interest in abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction, while remaining distinct from the works he created before and after.

The period under investigation was marked by two important trips, which were, in fact, two returns: in late 1958, the artist came back to Paris after a prolonged stay in Venezuela; in mid-1964, he traveled back to his native country, where he resided for the rest of his life. Between those two returns, there was the time for intense and prolific artistic activities, which resulted in a unique body of work, highly “Vigas,” as the artist would have said.

Vigas had lived in Paris since late-1952 and since 1956 had exhibited there regularly. In the first years of his sojourn in the French capital, he had studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts and later took philosophy classes at the Sorbonne. Recognised as an emerging talent associated with the post-war resurgence of figuration, he was later invited to participate in the bienials in Venice, Barcelona, and São Paulo. While asserting his presence as a painter, both internationally and locally,4 Vigas allied himself with a group of expatriate Latin American artists in Paris, a group that included Antonio Berni, Agustín Cárdenas, Jorge R. Camacho Lazo, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Alicia Penalba, Mercedes Pardo, and Fernando de Szyszlo. He also became

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involved with the review Signal, in which the writings of the critics RaoulJean Moulin, José-Augusto França, Jean-Clarence Lambert, and Karl-Kristian Ringström were published. All of these artists and critics advocated new approches to figuration with roots in both expressionistic tendencies in modern art and pre-Columbian art and cultures, the latter source treated as “prehistoric” and therefore universal.5 In early discussions of Vigas’s works European critics stressed and praised his unique blend of Dionysian emotionalism, expressed in the very process of creating art, and employed as a form of direct communication with the viewer, which they frequently linked to his fiery, “Latin American” temperament. In 1957, Vigas described his style of that time in a more general and, one might say, more open manner as “[a] system of signs and symbols, a personal way of conceiving objects, figures, planes of color, lines, spaces,”6 pointing to the heterogeneity of his artistic language, which relied on a complex matrix of referents and modes of expressions.

During his stay in Venezuela in 1958, Vigas actively participated in artistic life there, as well as in the popular social movement that led to the overthrowing of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the dictator who had ruled Venezuela since 1952. In November, when Vigas returned to France, he found the country he resided in different than the one he had left. A few months later Charles de Gaulle would be sworn as the first president of the Fifth Republic, while civil war would be raging in Algeria. There were significant cultural changes as well, particularly in the way the French redefined the meaning of their “high culture” and contemporary art.7 That shift became clear when, in the following year, Pierre Restany published the “Constitutive Declaration of New Realism.” This manifesto equated New Realism with new ways of perceiving the real, “not through the prism of conceptual or imaginary transcription” but by dealing directly with reality—by which he meant the modern culture of consumption and mass media; it also declared easel painting a classical medium that “has had its day.”8 “Newness” was, in fact, a cri du jour: “New Realism” in art, the “New Wave” in cinema, the “Nouveau roman” in literature.

Upon Vigas’s return, his style started to change. In this period we encounter a new Vigas: constructivista turned into a rebellious informalista, as his approach to painting took a rather dramatic turn, this time toward a gestural style associated with abstract expressionism, the French equivalent of it ca-

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lled art informel,9 and what in Spanish became known as el informalismo.10 That shift in Vigas’s art paralleled that of the artists often referred to as second-generation Abstract Expressionists,11 and in France the proponents of lyrical abstraction,12 who were dissatisfied with the growing presence of pop art and New Realism, as well as with a conceptual push toward neo-dada.13 In France, the vitality of “heroic” figuration was reinforced by the presence of the “Old Masters” of modern art: Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, as well as by the lasting appeal of existentialism with its emphasis on the human condition in which existence precedes essence. André Breton’s continuous advocacy of the importance of the surrealist spirit, with its affirmation of “convulsive beauty” and its interest in indigenous cultures also played an important role in keeping figuration alive, while critical thinking about the social and cultural significance of modern art was impacted by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, published in 1955, which popularized a structural model (rather than a psychological one) to evaluate social reality.

Despite the repeated calls for “The Fall of Paris” since the beginning of the Second World War,14 the French capital clearly remained a vital center from which new ideas about art radiated worldwide after the war. However, those ideas were undergoing a rapid change on their own. As the art historian Catherine Dossin argues in her forthcoming book on the Parisian scene of that time, by the early 1960s ‘[n]ot only did Western Europeans rely heavily on the United States economically and politically, they were becoming dependent on its style, fashion and culture.”15 That “dependency” brought many more young European artists closer to pop art than to abstract expressionism, in part because at that time the latter was often perceived to be a derivative of European art, whereas the former was considered a genuine American expression.

Vigas never directly responded to the calls of American and British pop artists and French New Realists to bring art close to life by embracing the iconography of consumer culture. Neither did he fully subscribe to the prescriptions of Clement Greenberg, who advocated close attention to the surface of painting, and a confirmation of the flatness of the canvas, which influenced many artists in the United States and elsewhere. For the Venezuelan artist, such flatness derived not so much from the specificity of the medium of painting—a modern concept sui generis—as from the “primor-

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dial” aspects of art, which brought him closer to Jean Dubuffet and his treatment of materials for making art as “living substances” and to the CoBrA group.16 Subsequently, the surface in Vigas’s paintings in the late 1950s and early 1960s remained highly visceral, oozing with thick paint while exposing a jarring self-awareness as part of the act of creation. Many of his paintings from that period emphasize the porous quality of the surface, as well as the brush-work; in these works, the paint often behaves as if it were volcanic lava, imposing its own gravity on the natural terrain of the canvas. But there is also something highly theatrical in his distortion of the figure, which reinforces its tragic qualities. Some of the protagonists in Vigas’s paintings might, in fact, appear to descend from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the concept of which was influenced by Eastern forms of theater, but also

by Artaud’s sojourn in Mexico.17 In 1959-1960, Vigas painted a series of works with bold, rounded forms— abstract and figurative at the same time—which he tightly packed onto the flat pictorial space. Those works belong to the series “Piedras Fértiles (Paisajes y formas).” The expressions “fertile stones” and “landscapes and forms” suggest oppositions, but only if one treats them as abstract, logical constructs. Otherwise, they suggest a world of physical experience, in which past and present remain intertwined, benefiting from the tension and friction between them. Analyzing Vigas’s approach to space in painting, one might think about Hans Hofmann’s “push-pull” theory of movement, which relies on a combination of color, light and shape to animate the canvas, to make it “breathe,” as the artist discussed in his 1948 book The Search of the Real and Other Essays.18 Hofmann wrote: “The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit.”19 Vigas would have agreed with Hofmann that the aim of the creative process is not to imitate nature, but to work parallel to it, to contribute to its growth.

Still, even if Vigas’s paintings from that series, such as Piedras fertiles II, 1959 and Paisaje mítico XII, 1960, might recall some of Hofmann’s works, they are much more visceral, verging on abject. Clearly, although both artists might think in a similar ways about the formal requirements of modern art to assert its independence from Nature, each of them understands it in very different way. For the American painter Nature belongs predominantly to the realm of the beautiful, and ultimately the abstract, whereas for the Venezuelan ar-

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tist Nature is quintessentially sublime, and therefore much more “unstable” in terms of being either abstract or figurative. Heavily on the side of the emotional, Vigas’s art is anti-classical—it belongs to the realm of passion and violence. It is in that dynamic realm that Vigas found a fertile ground to grow his forms in the late 1950s and early 1960s: he piles them on top of each other, layering them like geological cross-sections —Paisaje mítico IV, 1959—, or carves them out like crevices filled with organic deposits undergoing gradual decomposition —Piedras fértiles XV, 1960—. To convey a sense of the Sublime chromatically, the artist chose a Rembranesque palette, rich in blacks, browns, ochres, siennas, umbers, and vermilons, which is also reminiscent of Goya’s “Black paintings.”

While in Venezuela 1961 marked the beginning of a relative (and ultimately deceptive) political tranquility, France continued to be rocked by political and social unrest, culminating in mid-October with the attack by French police on a peaceful demonstration by the Algerians living in the country that left 40 people dead. It was also the year of a number of deaths among the prominent figures of French culture and the arts, among them Maurice Merleau-Ponty, George Bataille, Céline, and Yves Klein. Despite these disturbances, artistic life in the French capital remained vibrant, attracting new artists in search of fame, to the point that it was satirized in the 1961 British movie The Rebel (US title, Call Me Genius), in which the main protagonist, who moved from London to Paris to become a painter, splashes paint onto the canvas and rides a bike over it to achieve an effect similar to that of Pollock’s drip technique, as well as to Yves Klein’s “Anthropométries,” in which female models were used as “living brushes.”

In 1961, Vigas participated in the “XVIIe Salon de Mai” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris—next to Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Gino Severini, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, and Dorothea Tanning. Later that year he exhibited his newest canvases at the Galerie Neufville, with Ann Weber and Atilla (Biro). Hence, his works were presented on the one hand among those by leading European and American modernists, and on the other, in a context of the latest developments of international art, and in the company of many artists from the United States, whose work the Galerie Neufville vigorously promoted.20 On the occasion of the show at the Galerie Neufville, the critic Michel Courtois noticed the change in Vigas’s work, calling the artist’s sensibility “more contemplative.”21 French art critics continued, therefore, to em-

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phasize the sensual and emotional aspects of Vigas’s art, but softer than before, and not necessarily “Latin American.” On his side, Vigas, like many of his colleagues from South and Central Americas, became preoccupied with the questions of how to understand his identity as a Latin American exile in Europe, but also how to distinguish himself from others in that same situation, and how to find the right relationship between difference and uniqueness. To answer such questions required him to look not just at unique aesthetics and creative temperaments, but also to address specific cultural and political concerns native to South and Central Americas, because for many the term “Latin American” often carried a connotation of activism.22 Confronted with such a dilemma, Vigas found himself triangulating among French, American, and “Latin American” artistic traditions. At the same time, searching to protect his individuality, the artist remained responsive to broader human concerns.

In 1961, Vigas’s work underwent further transformation: he moved closer toward lyrical abstraction, which, as a “softer” offspring of abstract expressionism, opposed cubism, surrealism, and the pre-war École de Paris. Artists who worked in that style championed Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky, while paying close attention to the works of Bazaine, Nicolas de Staël, and Wols, as well as to the new “hot” artists, Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages in particular. Nacientes III, an oil on paper from 1961, shows, in fact, how Vigas experimented with a gestural style reminiscent of calligraphy; and his Concretizatión III, 1961 uses the technique of applying the paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, which by that time Mathieu had turned into a performance. But, here again, Vigas remains true to himself, probing the essence of his identity as an artist who looks back to prehistory and mythology for inspiration, open to the experience of others, but highly possessive of his desire to remain anchored in his native culture. Nowhere probably, is, this tendency as visible as in his large canvas Gran paisaje mítico, 1961. The landscape in it seems to be so “great” that the only way one can experience it is looking from high above. Seen through a sort of haze, it resembles an inchoate, cartographic mirage, its mythical dimension matching the description of a huge map Jorge Luis Borges described in an enigmatic, one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science.”23 In that text, Borges tells us that this “map-territory” has been deposited in an anonymous “desert of the West,” where it serves as an occasional shelter for beggars and beasts. Looking at Vigas’s painting, one might detect a similar search for

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“equilibrium” between art and life, in which decomposition and growth are part of the same process, where the West gradually decays, while the sun shines in the South.

In politics, 1962 was the year marked by the proclamation of independence in Algeria and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which put the world on the brink of nuclear war. In May the stock market crashed in New York, which had a dramatic impact on the art market, producing, as Dossin observes, waves of panic among art buyers, especially in Paris, from which emerged “a global cabal against abstract art.”24 That year has been viewed as marking the emergence of pop art. For Vigas, 1962 belonged to another intense period in his own artistic life, during which he further engaged in probing the boundaries between figuration and abstraction on his own.25 He exhibited in the Galerie Neufville, with Mariano Hernandez, Joan Mitchell, John von Wicht, and others, all of whom presented works painted in a gestural style and which would lead to his solo show at that gallery the following year. That show would confirm Vigas’s alliance with art that rejected “rationalist” tendencies, such as pop art and op-art, and embraced expressiveness as its main form of communication.

In 1962, Vigas’s search for blending figuration with abstraction achieved a new level of visceral sophistication in the series “Personagreste,” and the paintings with “cabeza” (head) in their title.26 In those works the artist shifts attention from landscape toward the figure, which once again often appears as a mythological creature, its presence truly haunting. What distinguishes those figures from, for instance, his famous “Brujas” (“Witches”)27, is that they are less totemic; also his new figures frequently appear in pairs.28 Instead of a hypnotic and occasionally spine-chilling dance, as in “Brujas,” we watch couples in a passionate embrace, as in Personagreste IV, 1962. Insecto II, 1962 is one of the most intriguing images from this period. The oil on canvas depicts a creature with bulging eyes that recalls Vigas’s witches, but it is reduced to an anthropomorphized shape comprising just a few looping lines executed in bold strokes of red, blue and black. These brushstokes “carry” the emotional weight of the image, suggesting an intense discharge of creative (and possibly erotic) energy, while producing a highly painterly effect.

Again, critics were quick to notice the change. On the occasion of the exhibition “Martin Bradley, Byung, Vigas,” at the Galerie Librairie Anglaise in Au-

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gust 1963, Vigas’s paintings were praised again for being “gestural and strongly stormy.”29 José-Augusto França called Vigas’s paintings: “An uplifting spectacle, maybe a little monstrous, of unforeseen dimensions: those black shapes, living snakes, menacing in oil compositions, are organized in his gouaches, joining the game of key gestures as a key to our reading, or as compasses marking the path.”30 What all those critics stressed was a spectacular meshing of passion and lyricism, which, in fact, constitutes one of the main strengths of Vigas’s art, regardless of its stylistic particularities.

In 1964, the year of Vigas’s return to Venezuela, Georges Braque died, leaving Picasso as the last living pioneer of heroic modern figuration in France.

It was the year when Robert Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennial, which, for many, marked the real “Fall of Paris,” as the center of the art world moved to New York. In Europe, the influence of American culture, both “high” and “low,” was on the rise. That phenomenon had already been brilliantly captured by Jean-Luc Godard’s debut masterpiece, “Breathless” (released in 1960), which depicts Paris as a mecca for adventurous young people, and where a French hoodlum (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo), modeling himself on the characters played by Humphrey Bogart, falls in love with an American exchange student (played by Jean Seberg), who likes William Faulkner, Mozart, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.31 But, in 1964 this was not exactly Vigas’s Paris, because, as Janine Castes explains: “Oswaldo didn’t feel “at home” in France any longer. Hence, at the age of thirty-eight, he chose to start a “new” chapter in his life by returning to his native country, where he became involved in making and promoting art with a new energy.

In 1964, Vigas’s individual show from the Galerie Neufville, which took place in the previous year, was enlarged when presented at the Fundación Eugenio Mendoza in Caracas. Among the works included in that exhibition were Naciente I, Géminis, both from 1962, and Vuelo ígneo, 1963. The two former works display once again a subtle interplay of figuration with abstraction, clearly Vigas’s signature style by then; the latter is a prime example of the gestural abstraction, closer to those of Cy Twombly than to Jackson Pollock’s, that characterizes Vigas’s works from 1963-64. While the linear forms “float” against the white and ochre background, they crisscross the surface, gently coiling, twisting, and turning, producing a modern figura serpentinata that sets the image into unending motion. Despite being a highly abstract

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image, one might detect in it the contours of two anthropomorphized, birdand animal-like figures, one hovering over the other. Although the dynamics of that interaction is impossible to determine unequivocally (it could be a fight or an act of making love, or both), the image seems to be about the essence of human nature, where violence and love are often intertwined, and the expression of which gestural abstraction facilitates through the rhythmic action of the brush. One can also think about Vigas’s gestural style as a form of performative writing in the present tense: the movement of the artist’s hand becoming the agent of emotions, which he shares with the viewer. Consequently, what happens in Vigas’s painting happens in the present—physically, bodily, spatially—revealing itself splendidly right before our eyes.

Paradoxically, after his return to Venezuela Vigas ceased to be labeled as a Latin American artist, or at least, critics did not do so as frequently as before, and, when they did, that distinction became much more nuanced.32 One might say that his homecoming allowed him to assert his position as a universal artist living in South America. That shift was already reflected in a text accompanying his first individual exhibition in Venezuela immediately after his return. Writing for his show at the Foundation Eugenio Mendoza, Raoul-Jean Moulin begins his introduction as follows: “When Vigas exhibits for the first time in Paris in 1956, his painting highlights the constraints of a trade: the seduction of applying paints, a discipline for static and definite forms. Closed on itself, it needed [his] response.”33 For the next years in Paris, Vigas took on a challenge to do just that, to “respond” with a spectacular result, which prompted Moulin to finish his text with this assessment of the exhibition: “We participate in a manifestation of a worldview related to the moral responsibility of action.”34 Those words happened to be prophetic: for Vigas that responsible worldview would remain a foundation for his art in the years to come.

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Endnotes: 1 It also marks the “firstness” of experience for the viewers, because many works in this show have not been previously exhibited, or at least have not been for many years.

2 Quoted from the exhibition catalogue of “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs,” at Tate Modern, London and MoMA, New York, 2014.

3 The first one was “Vigas constructivista, Paris 1953-1957,” curated by Bélgica Rodríguez, November 2012-February 2013.

4 Among Vigas’s close friends in Paris were Corneille, Wifredo Lam, Alberto Magnelli, Roberto Matta, and Maya Picasso (daughter of Picasso and Marie-Therese). Other artist Vigas socialized with include: Jean Arp, Jean Dewasne, Max Ernst, Auguste Herbin, Henry Laurens, Alfred Manessier, Paul Rebeyrolle, Dorothea Tanning, Victor Vasarely, and Geer van Velde.

5 This group opposed the proponents of kinetic and op art, Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz Diez, who in Paris joined the circles of the abstract artists associated with the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a successor to Abstraction-Création, and associated with the Denise René Gallery.

6 Interview with A. Courvoiser, Elle magazine (2 November 1957); quoted from “Vigas Constructivista, Paris 1953-1957,” exh. cat., p. 34.

7 Emblematic for those changes were the release of Raymond Queneau novel Zazie in the Metro, written with the use of the néo-français that contested standard French, and the appearance of Astérix the Gaul in the first regular issue of the comic magazine Pilote.

8 P. Restany, “The New Realists,” quoted in, Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Ch. Harrison and P. Wood (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2007 ed.), p. 725. Also in 1960, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (“Group for Visual Research,” or GRAV) was founded in Paris, counting among its members several artists from Latin America.

9 The term was originated by the French critic Michel Tapié and popularized in his 1952 book Un Art autre.

10 Vigas was certainly acquainted with the newest French and American art through exhibitions in Paris, as well as in the United States. He had been a regular visitor to the United States since 1954. Among the US museums and galleries that showed his works are the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, San Diego Museum of Art, Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York, and M. A. Doran Gallery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Vigas mentioned Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, and Willem de Kooning among the North American artists whom he highly respected 11 In the United States, that group included Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Conrad Marca-Relli, and Theodoros Stamos, 12 Those proponents included Jean-René Bazaine, Roger Bissière, Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulage, and Pierre Tal-Coat.

13 Perhaps the best known example here is Philip Guston, whose work contained similar duality before it underwent transformation from gestural abstraction to neo-expressionism in the late 1960s, but also of the Chicago Imagists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (who was in Paris at the same time as Vigas), who opposed the dominance of the New York School. One might say the “return” of figuration was “in the air,” announced by, for example, a show at MoMA entitled “New Images of Man,” in 1959, the same year when Vigas had several shows in the United States. Curated by Peter Selz (who travelled to Paris in the late 1950s on a

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Fulbright scholarship), the MoMA show introduced figurative works by artists who did abstract art as well, and the style was called “new figuration,” opposing pop art. Selz included, among others, Dubuffet, Leon Golub, Rico Lebrun, Karel Appel, Jan Müller, Richard Diebenkorn, plus Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, but almost half of the works in that show were sculptures.

14 Harold Rosenberg published “The Fall of Paris” in Partisan Review in 1940, in which he anticipated the emergence of New York as a major center for modern art and culture.

“The laboratory of the twentieth century has been shot down”—allowing, eventually, American art to flourish. Earlier, Paris had represented the international in culture, “[n]ot because of its affirmative genius alone, but perhaps, on the contrary, through its passivity, which allowed it to be possessed by the searchers of every nation.” H. Rosenberg, “The Fall of Paris,” quoted from Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Ch. Harrison and P. Wood (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 550.

15 C. Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, forthcoming in January 2015), p. 1.

16 CoBrA existed between 1948 and 1951. Its members were advocates of the expressive freedom of children’s drawings, myths and Northern folk tales. Vigas has been friends with Jean-Clarence Lambert, a French critic and poet who wrote books on the movement. He was also a close friend of Corneille. The original acronym was made of the first letters of the names of the cities from which the members of the founding group came from: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

17 “The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood.

This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.” Quoted from, Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Eric Bentley (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 66.

18 “Nature’s purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus – not imitation….

From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life – all movement and rhythm – time and light, color and mood – in short, all reality in Form and Thought.” Quoted from, H. Hofmann, The Search for the Real, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967).

19 Quoted from, Search for the Real and Other Essays (Andover, M.A.: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1948), pp. 40–48.

20 The gallery was operated by Beatrice Monti della Corte and Lawrence Rubin, who had strong ties with Milan and New York, and exhibited many American artists, among them, Adolph Gottlieb, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Joan Mitchell (her first solo exhibition in Europe), Kenneth Noland, Ray Parker, and Frank Stella. The exhibitions at the gallery were reviewed by, among others, the poet John Ashbery, who wrote regularly for Art International. In 1960, Vigas also had a show at the Galerie La Roue in Paris, and had several shows in the United States.

21 M. Courtois, a review in Arts et Spectacles: “Vigas, d’une sensibilité plus contemplative, distille des morceaux d’espaces chargés d’une fine émotion, dans un registre jaune-sable et brun, empreinte de dignité.”

22 The “Latin American” artists in Paris represented a variety of cultures, as well as variety of artistic affiliations. Still, one might argue that in Paris they formed an “informal” artistic community, based on the commonality of culture and language. In addition, many of them escaped the political unrests in their native countries.

23 Jorge Luis Borges “On Exactitude in Science;” published in 1946 under the name B.

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Lynch Davis (a pseudonym shared by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, another Argentinean author), the story was then credited to a certain Suarez Miranda.

24 C. Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, p.8.

25 Although he served as a coordinator of exhibitions of Latin American artists in Europe—including the Venice Biennale, where he was the curator of the Venezuelan Pavillon and joined the organizing committee of “L’Art Latinoaméricain à Paris,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which was the first show devoted to current art produced by “Latin American” artists living in France (some 138 artists participated)—that year he resigned from the position of the Cultural Attaché of the Embassy of Venezuela in France.

26 The word personagreste was invented by Vigas. It combines “persona,” person or a human being, and “agreste,” which stands for “agrarian” or “rustic:” in short it might be loosely translated as a “rustic person.”

27 Vigas started the “Witches” series in the early 1950s. He would produce more paintings with this title after his return to Venezuela in 1964.

28 This iconography might allude to the beginning of his new relationship with his future wife, Janine Castès.

29 The Korean critic Lee Yil wrote: “A violently gestural and strongly stormy painting which outbursts impress us. His paintings reflect a telluric unit held by an irresistible impulse of creative capacity.” “Vigas,” exh. cat., Galerie Neufville, Paris, November 1963. Quoted from, “Oswaldo Vigas, Paintings from 1960-1964” exh. cat., Fundatión Eugenio Mendoza, Caracas, July – August 1964, p. 73.

30 J-A. França, “Vigas: Etchings, Drawings, Gouaches,” exh. cat. Caracas Athenaeum, Caracas, November 1964, p.22.

31 The connection between Vigas’s art and the cinematic techniques of the early 1960s are yet to be discussed. According to Janine Castès, Vigas saw “Breathless” in 1960 and was a great fan of the French cinema of that period. Godard’s movie is considered a “mythic moment” in terms of establishing cinema as a serious art form, but also a “pop icon.”

32 “Passion and violence in the creative act characterize Latin American art as a whole.

The man takes the measure of his strength against the excesses of the physical world: he surely feels more than any other, the imperative necessity of the natural gesture. By doing so, Vigas enters in direct contact with reality and the surprising frankness of his gesture discovers forgotten powers, immersed in the thickness of the times, which finally release themselves and arise in the crude splendor of his lyricism. In swirls of bright colors, exploiting flashing impulses. Vigas already participates in the nature of this new world.” RJ. Moulin, “Oswaldo Vigas, Paintings from 1960-1964,” exh. cat.

33 “Lorsque VIGAS expose pour la première fois à Paris, en 1956, sa peinture met en évidence les constraines d’un mêtier: la séduction de pâtes travaillées avec application, une discipline de formes statiques et définies. Fermée sur elle-même, elle se devait de réagir.”

Ibid.

34 “Nous participons à la manifestation d’une conception du monde, liée à une morale de l’action.” Ibid.

Written by Dr. Marek Bartelik, current president of the International Association of Art Critics, on occasion of the exhibition "Vigas Informalista. Paris 1959-1964", presented in the Ascaso Gallery, Miami, from November 30 2014 to March 30 2015.

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BRUJA DE LA LIBÉLULA, 1950 Oil on canvas 71 x 58 cm

BRUJA NOCTURNA, 1951 Oil on canvas 65 x 55,9 cm

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BRUJA VIOLETA, 1951 Oil on paper glued on cardboard 60 x 47 cm

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BRUJA, 1952 Oil on paper glued on cardboard 27 x 20,5 cm

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LA RED, 1952 Oil on canvas 99 x 55 cm

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PERSONAJE VEGETAL, 1956 Oil on cardboard glued on plywood 80 x 52 cm

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INSECTO I, 1962 Oil on canvas 38 x 46 cm

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SIN TÍTULO, 1962 Oil on canvas 27 x 22 cm

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GÉMINIS, 1962 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

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BESTIARIO, 1963 Oil on canvas 110,5 x 84 cm

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MUSARAÑA, 1962 Oil on canvas 38 x 61 cm

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CABEZA INFORME, 1962 Oil on canvas 46 x 38 cm

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PERSONAGRESTE IV, 1962 Oil on canvas 47 x 39 cm

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AVES AGORERAS, 1963 Oil on canvas 120 x 120 cm

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GRUPO SELVÁTICO, 1985 Oil on canvas 135 x 100 cm

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GRUPO AZUL, 1978 Oil on canvas 150 x 120 cm

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SIN TÍTULO, 1973-1979 Oil on canvas 190 x 138 cm

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CABEZA METAFÍSICA GRIS, 1987 Oil on canvas 80 x 100 cm

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CHAMAGÓN, 1985 Oil on canvas 135 x 100 cm

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FELINO, 1986 Oil on wood 56 x 63,5 cm

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CABEZA DE MÍSTICO, 1986 Óleo on wood 45 x 36 cm

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PARAÍSO INCONCLUSO, 1990 Oil on canvas 130 x 185 cm

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DUENDE CON CALAO, 1992 Oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

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EL ESPÍRITU DE LA TIERRA, 1994 Oil on yute 46 x 61 cm

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REENCARNADA, 1992 Oil on canvas 130 x 100 cm

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ATLANTES, 1994 Oil on canvas 130 x 100 cm

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LA VISITACIÓN, 1994 Oil on canvas 140 x 190 cm

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LA BÉTE ET LA CARCASSE (LA BESTIA Y LA CARCASA), 1995 Oil on canvas 140 x 140 cm

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PAREJA EN EL SOL, 1994 Oil on canvas 89 x 116 cm

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FEMME SCORPION COUCHÉE, 1995 Oil on canvas 42 x 70 cm

EL PERRO Y SU DUEÑA, 1997 Oil on canvas 130 x 100 cm

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FIGURA FESTIVA, 1999 Oil on canvas 110 x 80 cm

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EL CABALLO ENAMORADO, 1997 Oil on canvas 100 x 130 cm

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DOS ENTES, 1999 Oil on canvas 115 x 170 cm

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ZARABANDA EN GRIS, 2003 Oil on canvas 120 x 250 cm

FIGURA RITUAL CON ANIMAL I, 1999 Oil on canvas 80 x 80 cm

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EN LA ESTACIÓN DE MONTPARNASSE, 2001 Oil on canvas 200 x 200 cm

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FIGURA ARDIENTE I, 2003 Oil on canvas 81 x 50,5 cm

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TORSO DE GIGANTE, 2010 Oil on canvas 83 x 202 cm

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CONSTELACIÓN DEL PÁJARO AZUL, 1998 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

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SEVENTY YEARS IN ART BÉLGICA RODRÍGUEZ

Oswaldo Vigas during the exhibition “Bradley, Byun, Vigas”, at GalerieLibrairie Anglaise in Paris, 1963

Summarizing Oswaldo Vigas’ ninety life and his seventy years of artistic production is a hard task. He possesses a unique talent for art, works tirelessly, has an endless sense of curiosity and he is always ready to delve into the adventures and mysteries of art. In 1942 Vigas began this ongoing journey with a string of solo exhibitions that continue today, as well as taking part in countless group shows. The sense of satisfaction at receiving so many prizes for his work must truly be an impulse for him to continue creating.

Although he is self-taught, Vigas’ innate talent has enabled him to develop as an artist. He was born in Valencia, Carabobo State, on August 4th 1925 to José de Jesús Vigas, a doctor, and Nieves Linares. He got used to moving around from an early age, spending his early childhood in his home town before living in Puerto Cabello, Tinaquillo and Guacara from 1934 until 1946.

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He spent much of his time in Valencia, an important cultural center in Venezuela, where he associated with young poets and did his first paintings, as well as fantastical drawings and illustrations for poetry. In 1942, he entered these illustrations in the First Illustrated Poetry Contest, which was organized by the Valencia Atheneum, and won first prize. That same year Vigas had his first solo exhibition at the Valencia Atheneum. In 1943 he entered his painting Hojas rojas in the First Arturo Michelena Painting Contest, Valencia Atheneum, where he was not only accepted but was also awarded the Gold Medal. From that point on and for a number of years he took part in the Arturo Michelena Art Contest, which had become the thermometer for the Venezuelan art scene. He had a solo show of Cubist-influenced goaches and watercolors in the Valencia Atheneum as well as exhibiting thirteen oil paintings and ten watercolors there in what was his second solo show. That year Vigas travelled to Merida to begin a degree in medicine at the Los Andes University. Remaining active as a painter all the while, he later graduated in medicine from the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, although he never practiced as a doctor because he realized that it was highly incompatible with his artistic vocation.

The second half of the forties was a period of intense activity. In 1947 Vigas took part in the Merida Atheneum as a founding member and travelled frequently to Caracas and Valencia, working, exhibiting and selling his works in those two cities. His work included oil paintings, drawings, watercolors and goaches of different landscapes and female figures that hinted toward his well-known subject: the witch, an icon in Vigas’ painting. In 1949 he won first prize in the First Painting Contest of the Merida Atheneum. That same year he moved to Caracas to continue studying medicine. He became a member of Free Art Workshop, which was created in 1948 with support from the Culture Department at the Ministry of Education, with the aim of researching new forms of expression that differed greatly from the academic training artists received at the Cristóbal Rojas Art School in Caracas. The human figure continued to predominate in his work, but his style became more aggressive and free in its gestures, by contrast to the artistic conventions of the time. He discovered pottery and pre-Colombian sculpture. His interest in pre-Hispanic cultures led him ever close to the topic of the witch.

A new decade began: the fifties were without at a doubt the time when Vigas consolidated his signature style, which he did so precisely and solidly,

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becoming one of the most important painters in Venezuela. In 1951 he exhibited new works at the VIII Arturo Michelena Art Contest at the Valencia Atheneum in the III A. Planchart Annual Painting Contest and in various group shows organized by the Free Art Workshop. He was awarded the Lastenia Tello de Michelena Prize. He founded the magazine Taller alongside Alirio Oramas. 1952 was a particularly active year, as Vigas exhibited works at the XII Official Venezuelan Art Contest XII at the Museum of Fine Arts, in which he entered three big paintings; he was awarded the National Fine Arts Prize for La gran bruja and the John Boulton Prize for Mujer. The most outsanding event of the year was the Retrospective Exhibition, 1946-1952, 50 Works, held at the Valencia Atheneum. At the end of the year he travelled to Paris with the Airplane Ticket Prize that came with the National Prize and spent twelve years living in the French capital. In 1953 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, studied open art courses at the Sorbonne and came into contact with the art world, as well as with painters and sculptors from different countries. He took part in several group shows: Valencia Atheneum; II São Paulo Art Biennale, Brazil; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, and in the IX Salón de Mai —which he took part on several occasions— with the painting América la madre. He travelled to Spain and became a faithful visitor of the Museo del Prado where he could nourish his interest in Goya and El Greco. The architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva made Vigas an important offer, inviting him to take part in his project Integration of the Arts, which he was proposing for Caracas’ University City. Vigas accepted the invitation and made four murals in Venetian mosaic and another in Roman mosaic, all created in Paris. At the start of 1954 Vigas took part in the exhibition Oeuvres pour la Cité Universitaire de Caracas Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where fragments of his works were shown alongside works by other artists invited to take part, such as Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, Victor Vasarely, Alexander Calder and the Venezuelan artists Mateo Manaure, Pascual Navarro, Armando Barrios and Alirio Oramas, among others. Eighteen painters and one sculpture inaugurated the Venezuelan Pavilion at the XXVII Venice Biennale; Vigas exhibited three paintings in the pavilion. He was invited to take part in a group show organized by the Pan-American Union (today known as the OAS) in Washington, DC, and to have a solo exhibition at Cuatro Vientos Gallery in Caracas. The fifties are years full of group exhibitions: Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas; Galerie de Beaune, Paris; Salon de Mai, Paris; XIII Arturo Michelena Art Contest, Valencia Atheneum; Valencia International Exhibition to celebrate the city’s

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four hundredth anniversary, where Vigas was awarded the Shell Prize; III Hispano-American Biennale, Barcelona, Spain; III São Paulo Biennale, and the The 1955 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting, Carniege Institute, Pennsylvania, USA. The Valencia Atheneum commissioned him to organize Venezuelan artists’participation in Paris and the foreign delegation of the International Painting Exhibition. In 1957 he returned to Venezuela and exhibited works at a series of geometric-gestural paintings entitled Objects at the Sala Mendoza. From 1958-1964 he was appointed Cultural Attaché of the Venezuelan Embassy in Paris. In 1962 he was appointed Commissioner for Venezuela’s participation in the XXXI Venice Biennale. He began to work within the Informalist style and created many paintings in this style, one of which earned him the Arturo Michelena Prize at the homonymous art contest. According to analyses of his work, his Informalist experience gave new force to his figurative work and led him to return to witches as his subject. When he was named Head of Culture at the Andes University in Merida in 1965 he worked on creating the city’s art museum the Merida Museum of Art. After his time in the capital of the Andean region, Vigas moved to Caracas at the start of the seventies. In 1971 he was appointed Director of the Art Division at the National Culture Institute, (INCIBA). In 1972 he resigned but maintained his ties with the art and cultural sector. Over the next few years he joined the Preparatory and Organizational Committee at the National Culture Council, which replaced the INCIBA, and the National Art Gallery. In 1976 he was appointed Member of the Board of Directors at the Museum of Fine Arts and the National Art Gallery in Caracas. In 1979 the latter museum presented a large-scale retrospective show of Vigas’ works from 1943-1977.

The eighties began with the exhibition Proposal 20. It was a very productive decade for Vigas, during which he made several series of tapestries and ceramic works, including three-dimensional works using refractories and earthenware, plates, bowls and other non-utilitarian pieces that depicted the fantastical beings that are frequently found in his work. He showed, at that time, real interest in sculpture and made his first bronze-cast works, which he exhibited in 1985.

1990 began with a retrospective exhibition of more than two thousands works, including paintings, sculpture, tapestry, ceramic works, jewelry and craft, which was organized by the Sofía Imber Contemporary Art Museum

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of Caracas. The oil company Lagoven made a short film about his life and work and a substantial monograph written by the French critic Gaston Diehl was published. Vigas exhibited at the XXVI International Contemporary Art Prize in Monaco and won the Gran Prix SAS Le Prince Reyner III for his work Crucifixión VII. He continued with his feverish work and had a succession of different exhibitions, including, in 1993, the show Vigas from 1952 to 1993, which featured one hundred and thirty seven works that covered the walls of the Monnaie de Paris. In 1996 he had the exhibition Oswaldo Vigas: an American Man in the Casa de Las Américas in La Habana, Cuba. The decade ended with Vigas as the artist of honor at the Caracas Ibero-American Art Fair (FIA), which was in its seventh year (1999).

The twenty-first Century enters fully into the life and work of Oswaldo Vigas.

Many solo exhibitions: Entities, colonieras and souvenirs, Dimaca Gallery, Caracas; Noon Fiction, Ascaso Art Gallery, Caracas; Ideographs from Paris, 1952-1957, Sofia Imber Museum of Contemporary Art, Caracas, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Maracaibo, Zulia, Venezuela; Oswaldo Vigas, Sérigraphies, Institut National des Sciences Apliquées, Lyon, France; Memories of the present and Oswaldo Vigas in Paris. His works from the sixties, Ascaso Art Gallery, Caracas. In Ciudad Banesco, headquarters of the bank of the same name, Vigas presents his mural in venetian mosaic, Trilogy for Banesco, five meters wide by forty long; Sortilèges des Tropiques, Jean Lurcat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine Museum, Angers, France; Creatures of wonder, Medici Gallery, Caracas; Oswaldo Vigas, Intervalores, Caracas; Oswaldo Vigas, CAF Gallery, Caracas; Land and Fire, BBVA Banco Provincial, Caracas; Oswaldo Vigas in Art Nocturne Knokke, Mary Ann Manning Gallery, Belgium; From Witches to Healers, outdoor museum, Fernando Peñalver Park, Valencia, Venezuela; Vigas Outdoors, Museum of Baruta Town Hall, Caracas; Vigas on paper, 700 Art Gallery, Maracaibo; Oswaldo Vigas: Mérida, París, Caracas, Villa Tamaris Centre d’Art, La Seyne-sur-mer, France. Notes, sketches and drawings, Caracas Athenaeum Gallery; Constructivist Vigas, Paris 1953–1957, Ascaso Gallery, Miami, and Ascaso Art Gallery, Caracas; Vigas in Black and White, France Embassy, Caracas; Oswaldo Vigas, RGR Art Gallery, Valencia, Venezuela. Vigas participates in group exhibitions: Master pieces of the Great Masters, Dimaca Gallery, Caracas; Sofia Imber Museum of Contemporary Art, Caracas, Maison de la Culture du Japón, Paris; Latin America and the Caribbean: contemporary art today, Reaction and controversy in Venezuelan Art, National Art Gallery, Caracas; Central

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University, Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas: Synthesis of Major Arts, Six Decades, 1953–2013, Banco Provincial Foundation, Caracas; Vigas Constructivista 1953–1957, Ascaso Gallery, Miami; Oswaldo Vigas, Antológica 1943– 2013, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Lima; Vigas Informalista 1959–1964, Ascaso Gallery, Miami; Oswaldo Vigas, Antológica 1943–2013, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile. Vigas was part of many editions of the Iberoamerican Art Fair (FIA), with the Aldo Castillo Gallery. He participates in the Latin American & Caribbean Art Today, Miura Museum of Art, Miura, Japón; I Exxon Mobil de Venezuela Art Salon, Sacrum Museum, Caracas; The Twentieth Century on paper. The figure, Arturo Michelena Museum, Caracas; Geometric Abstraction in Venezuela, Simón Bolívar University, Caracas; Geometry as a vanguard, Mercantil Collection, Alejandro Otero Museum, Caracas; Documentary, 30 years in Venezuelan art, National Art Gallery, Caracas. With the text of the historian and art theorist Carlos Silva, the book Oswaldo Vigas. Tomorrow’s Legend is published.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1974 Andrés Bello Order, First Class, Venezuela 1990 Francisco de Miranda Order, First Class, Venezuela 1992 Sol de Carabobo Order, Grand Officer, Valencia, Venezuela 1993 Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France, Ministry of Culture and the Francophonie of France 1994 Ordre du Mérite et Dévouement Français, France 1996 Alejo Zuloaga Order, Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela; Samán de Aragua Order, Maracay, Aragua, Venezuela 1997 Ciudad de Valencia Order, First Class, Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela; Ciudad de Tinaquillo Order, First Class, Tinaquillo, Cojedes, Venezuela; Pedro Ángel González Fine Arts Medal, Caracas 1998 Universidad Central de Venezuela Order, Caracas 1999 Honoris Causa Doctorate, Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela 2003 Official Guest to the 56th International Cinema Festival of Cannes, France 2008 Arts and Letters Commander Order, Ministry of Culture of the French Republic 2012 Honoris Causa Doctorate by the Universidad Nororiental Privada Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, Barcelona, Anzoátegui, Venezuela.

Oswaldo Vigas in his atelier-room at “Hotel D’aubusson” Paris, 1963

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REPRESENTED IN Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela | Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, Venezuela | Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela | Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, Venezuela | Museo de Barcelona, estado Anzoátegui, Venezuela | Ateneo de Valencia, estado Carabobo, Venezuela | Colección Petróleos de Venezuela, PDVSA, Caracas, Venezuela | Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, USA | Michigan State University Art Museum, Michigan, USA | Národní Galerie v Praze, Prague, Czech Republic | Museo de Arte de Las Américas, OAS, Washington, USA | The Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA | Archer M. Huntington Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, USA | Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA | Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes, Paris, France | Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, Angers, France | Musée du Val-de-Marne, FNAC, France | Muzeum Narodowe we Wroclawiu, Polska | Musée d’Algeri, Alger | Art Gallery of the Non-Aligned Countries, Belgrad, Yugoslavia | Casa de Las Américas, La Habana, Cuba | Museo de Bellas Artes, Ciudad de Panamá, Panamá | Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia | Museo de Arte Contemporáneo El Minuto de Dios, Bogotá, Colombia | Museo de Arte Moderno, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia | Museo Bolivariano de Arte Contemporáneo, Santa Marta, Colombia | Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional Abierta de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia | Museo Ralli, Punta del Este, Uruguay | Avon Collection, New York, USA | Colección Empresas Polar, Caracas, Venezuela | Colección Banco Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela | Colección Mercantil, Caracas, Venezuela | Colección Banesco, Caracas, Venezuela | Colección Banco Provincial, Caracas, Venezuela | Private collections in different countries of the world | Musée Des Beaux Arts D´ Angers, France | Musée Des Beaux Arts, Reims, France.

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