constructivista VIGAS París 1953-1957 constructivista París 1953-1957 VIGAS constructivista BÉLGICA RODRÍGUEZ Since he started out as an artist, Oswaldo Vigas has thought about abstractions, rather than images as such. These abstractions do not seek aesthetic justifications beyond themselves. Rather, they are self-contained artistic expressions that dia- logue with artistic and historical concepts in tune with explicitly aesthetic concerns which —when considered from the formalist critical approach that is so condem- ned today— situate his work as a unique expressive, representative and organic form of visual writing. In this sense, Vigas’ work cannot be reduced to a simple schema of abstraction. It is much more complex than that, since it has developed in line with multiple factors: instinctive perception, knowledge of the rules of pain- ting, and in response to the context the artist’s practice exists within. The decade of the fifties signaled a change in the life and work of this prolific Venezuelan artist. In 1952 he travelled to Paris, excited by the three prizes he had been awarded in the Salón Oficial Anual de Arte and by the success of his first retrospective show at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, the most important in Venezuela, which covered ten years of what would become a suc- cessful career as an artist. In Paris, a mecca for international artists at the start of the twentieth century, Vigas encountered a dynamic, active and cosmopolitan scene bubbling over with experimentation and the quest to develop new ap- proaches to art. There, Vigas discovered Picasso, his Cubism and many other trends, and created a new framework for his work by adapting abstract and Constructivist trends that he would channel into figurative and abstract works for which his signature style still provided an identifiable substratum. In his series Ob- jetos negros (Black Objects), Formas tensionales (Tense Forms) and Proyectos para murales (Projects for Murals) his abstract and geometric style took on a more radical form; however, it was not rigid but instead was infused with highly charged emotions. In 1953, Vigas enrolled at Marcel Jaudon’s engraving and lithography workshop at the École de Beaux Arts in the French capital, which in- fluenced the importance he gave to paper in much of his painting. He also took courses in Art History at La Sorbonne University and these tools enable him to deploy new approaches to his practice that generated several groups of works encompassing his exploration of new concepts, different to the ones he had worked on previously and that characterized his 1952 retrospective. This change in theme and concept also stimulated an inquiry into space in painting and other formats, which can been seen in the geometric series Pro- yectos para murales, which he made for the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas constructivista | 5 (Caracas University City). This project clearly affected the new route the artist took and led him to abandon his figurative style. It should be added that that Vigas’ interest in geometry had emerged at the start of the fifties when he was still in Venezuela, as can be seen in paintings such as Yare (fig. 1), La red (The Grid, 1952) (fig. 2) and Figura (Figure, 1953) (fig. 3), and even in works he made when still a student. In the midst of the creative explosions that shifted his work toward a geometric style, Vigas also worked on semi-figurative or semi-abstract Fig. 1 paintings like Muchacha del abanico (Girl with Fan, 1950), up until Gran YARE, 1952 Bruja (Big Witch, 1951) (fig. 4). Once he reached Paris, and without wasting any time, Vigas became acquain- ted with artists who had their own styles of abstract geometric art, including Jean Dewasne, Victor Vasarely, August Herbin and Fernand Léger; the Latin American artists Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta; and the sculptors Antoine Pevsner, Baltazar Lobo, Jean Arp, Robert Jacobsen and Henry Laurens, who were all prominent figures in the city’s cultural scene at that time. This period Fig. 2 spans three intense years (1953-56 approximately). It is important to recall LA RED, 1952 the peak of interest in geometric abstract art in Venezuela during the fifties, when many artists sought out conceptual and universal themes as the only way to free the nation’s painting from the hegemony of landscape painting by working with ideas that could only be expressed through geometric abstract art. This was the time of the Taller Libre de Arte in Caracas (Free Art Works- hop), which questioned Venezuelan art and promoted a more universal ap- proach. In 1957 Vigas returned to Venezuela during the zenith of abstract art, but he did not submit to local trends and continued to follow his own path. Fig. 3 FIGURA, 1953 Every rupture brings the resurrection of “something” unique with it, but this “so- mething” is necessarily related to previous production and bears the traces of the foundations that help generate new visual and conceptual platforms, on both a plastic and aesthetic level. Vigas researches, enquires, rummages, and studies here and there, and, as Carlos Silva would say, he is both author and subject; in my opinion, Vigas has created a theme where he endeavors to rein- sert certain values into art by tracing the mysteries of ancient and modern man’s spirits, which constantly appear in his work. During the first half of the fifties, Fig. 4 Vigas made abstract cryptograph-like images produced by combining a Mo- GRAN BRUJA, 1951 dernist attitude to art that came from the international art context, with a profound 6| VIGAS and planetary spirituality linked to mysticism and religion, which can be seen in works such as Personaje naciente I (Character Being Born I) (fig. 5), Composición (Composition) (fig. 6) and Selva y espíritu (Jungle and Spirit) (1953) (fig. 7). This does not mean that he was channeling the mysteries of the Venezuelan and Latin American pre-Hispanic creative spirit, but rather that he delved into and reached the unfathomable archetypes of mythology to discover phenomena that normal people do not necessarily see in order to create solid, infinite forms in time and space: forms that are, in other words, eternal. Each work from the three series in this period (that are included in this exhibition) is based on a net- Fig. 5 PERSONAJE NACIENTE I, 1953 work of thick or fine lines: lines that contain color and conceal invisible, syste- matic drawings of secret figures —a subtle inheritance of Piet Mondrian’s metaphysical transcendentalism that endured in new generations of abstract, geometric or organic artists. Resonating with the Cubist echoes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Constructivism of the Russian dissidents, Kasimir Ma- levich’s Suprematism, Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism and the magical collages of Jean Arp, these artists worked to create unique plastic architectures based Fig. 6 on geometric abstract art. The work Oswaldo Vigas made between 1953 and COMPOSICIÓN, 1953 1956 is located in this setting, where for three years he painted the series Pro- yectos para murales, Objetos and Formas tensionales. In his abstract geometric series, Vigas reduces figurative forms to formality and symbols without making them seem mechanical. On the contrary, he fills them with intimate emotion and tension through dense brushstrokes and color, or lack of it, and does not reveal exactly what natural or human object is being presented. One might consider the titles selected and the works they prefigure Fig. 7 are metaphorical, symbolic or even ironic, for irony is a constant element of Vigas’ SELVA Y ESPÍRITU, 1953 strong character both as man and artist. In analyzing Vigas’ work —and in the way the series in this exhibition are ordered— it is important to highlight the or- ganic associations that seem to communicate emotions inspired “by the soul”. The communication between these series and the spectator generates a sen- sorial experience based on the works relation to the physical world and the cosmos, especially in the case of the Objetos, which emphasize a metaphy- sical belief in non-representational painting, both in the artist’s own, emblematic imaginary and in the world around him. Vigas makes a radical arrival at a new formal structure by fracturing the image and continually transforming the concepts at work in his practice. Abstract geometric painting is not a hiatus in Oswaldo Vigas’ life as an artist, but rather is the result of ten years of thinking about art. constructivista | 7 The invitation he received from architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva to take part in the Integration of the Arts project at the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) was the catalyst that led Vigas to geometry. He made many sketches for the project that now form the series Proyectos para murales, several of which were integrated into the facades of some im- portant buildings on the campus, such as the Plaza del Rectorado. Two mural sized works were made in Venetian mosaic and their highly structured com- Fig. 8 positions accentuate the geometric relationships between lines and horizontal PROYECTO PARA MURAL EN VERDE, 1953 and vertical planes. Other illustrative works are Proyecto para mural en verde (Project for Green Mural) (fig. 8) and Proyecto para mural naranja (Project for Orange Mural) (fig. 9), which, despite the fact they were never built, nevertheless stand alone as art works because they reveal the maximum simplicity of form in the figures the artist was working on during the same decade. For instance, if one inverts the murals to make them vertical instead of horizontal, they clearly Fig. 9 PROYECTO PARA MURALEN NARANJA, resemble a stylized form of figuration and one can even identify figurative re- 1953 ferences in the geometric forms.