OSWALDO VIGAS: A SMALL TRIBUTE
I have a very vivid and full of affection memory of Oswaldo Vigas. I met him in Paris, in 1953, when I returned from Lima and I could not find a place to live within my very modest possibilities. He helped me to settle in the little hotel where he lived, the Hotel de Poitou at 22 Rue de Seine, in Saint Germain des Prés. The hotel had nineteen rooms, almost all of them occupied by Latin American artists. Jesús Soto had lived there before. Besides Vigas, the Venezuelan sculptor Víctor Valera, the Cuban poet José Álvarez Baraga, the Peruvian musician José Malsio, the Peruvian art critic Carlos Rodríguez Saavedra, and some others that I've forgotten, were there, too. I did not forget the names of the owners of the hotel, Monsieur and Madame Ployez, whose tolerance and generosity are unforgettable for those who lived there at the hotel.
At that time, the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva had built the University City in Caracas. He acquired works of art in Paris to enrich the university spaces. Villanueva chose the most prominent Venezuelan young artists together with established artists of international art. UNESCO declared the University City a World Heritage Site in 2000. At the University City of Caracas we find works by Alejandro Otero and Oswaldo Vigas, stained glass by Fernand Léger, sculptures by Arp and Laurens, and Alexander Calder's mobiles, among many others.
In 1955 I returned to Lima and I did not see him again until 1964, when the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas invited me to present an exhibition. It was a pleasant reunion with all the Venezuelan artists of Paris, especially with Vigas, for whom I always had a special affection and admiration. From that trip I keep a small Vigas' painting he painted in Paris in 1963. I met his wife, Janine, who already had become the rock on which he stood, the port from which he started new searches in his work, and the permanent and necessary companion for his life.
Since I'm not a critic, I quote the words the Romanian writer and critic Dan Haulica expressed in Vigas' exhibition at the La Monnaie de Paris museum in 1993: "In exploring Oswaldo Vigas' painting without special precautions, without several organizing and chronological accessories, following the random sequence of titles, the first thing we see is a density made of memory... Beyond rational ambitions, beyond the cubist and constructivist heritage, Vigas finds the way of a return journey to dark knots where time goes back, while being vertiginous like a waterfall that goes back to its origins."
I am sorry that Oswaldo cannot share with us the visit of his work to Lima. We will miss him.
Lima, August 2014. FERNANDO DE SZYSZLO
——————————————
OSWALDO VIGAS
Oswaldo Vigas discovered the thresholds to access the mysteries and secrets of other dawns and thus began his adventure with art at a very young age. Vigas was blessed with a special, innate talent and realized, amidst the shadows of the trees and the words whispered by the breeze that lulled the waves of the Cabriales River in his native Valencia, that he had a hidden vocation. He was born on August 4th 1926 into the open spaces of this important provincial city, which would gradually awaken his spirit and taste for beauty: painting was his destiny. His early inquiries opened his spirit to the creative "phantoms" that propelled him towards out of the ordinary revelations. His first Baroquestyle compositions Tetragramista II (FIG. 1) and Composición IV (FIG. 2) (both from 1943) feature Cubist-influenced fantastical shapes and figu...