VIGAS INFORMALISTA París 1959-1964 INFORMALISTA | 3 In his house in Caracas, Oswaldo Vigas remained creative until his very last days. VIGAS INFORMALISTA Paris 1959-1964 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 MAREK BARTELIK 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 pro- cess 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 imagina- tion.”2 And, like the French master, Vigas had an imagination that was un- questionably 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 bet- ween 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 abs- traction, 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 Sor- bonne. Recognised as an emerging talent associated with the post-war re- surgence 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 expa- triate Latin American artists in Paris, a group that included Antonio Berni, Agustín Cárdenas, Jorge R. Camacho Lazo, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, 4 | VIGAS INFORMALISTA | 5 Alicia Penalba, Mercedes Pardo, and Fernando de Szyszlo. He also became lled art informel,9 and what in Spanish became known as el informalismo.10 involved with the review Signal, in which the writings of the critics Raoul- That shift in Vigas’s art paralleled that of the artists often referred to as se- Jean Moulin, José-Augusto França, Jean-Clarence Lambert, and Karl-Kristian cond-generation Abstract Expressionists,11 and in France the proponents of Ringström were published. All of these artists and critics advocated new ap- lyrical abstraction,12 who were dissatisfied with the growing presence of pop proches to figuration with roots in both expressionistic tendencies in modern art and New Realism, as well as with a conceptual push toward neo-dada.13 art and pre-Columbian art and cultures, the latter source treated as “prehis- In France, the vitality of “heroic” figuration was reinforced by the presence toric” and therefore universal.5 In early discussions of Vigas’s works European of the “Old Masters” of modern art: Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Henri critics stressed and praised his unique blend of Dionysian emotionalism, ex- Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, as well as by the lasting appeal of existentialism pressed in the very process of creating art, and employed as a form of direct with its emphasis on the human condition in which existence precedes es- communication with the viewer, which they frequently linked to his fiery, sence. André Breton’s continuous advocacy of the importance of the surre- “Latin American” temperament. In 1957, Vigas described his style of that time alist spirit, with its affirmation of “convulsive beauty” and its interest in in a more general and, one might say, more open manner as “[a] system of indigenous cultures also played an important role in keeping figuration alive, signs and symbols, a personal way of conceiving objects, figures, planes of while critical thinking about the social and cultural significance of modern color, lines, spaces,”6 pointing to the heterogeneity of his artistic language, art was impacted by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, published in which relied on a complex matrix of referents and modes of expressions. 1955, which popularized a structural model (rather than a psychological one) to evaluate social reality. 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 Despite the repeated calls for “The Fall of Paris” since the beginning of the of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the dictator who had ruled Venezuela since Second World War,14 the French capital clearly remained a vital center from 1952. In November, when Vigas returned to France, he found the country he which new ideas about art radiated worldwide after the war. However, those resided in different than the one he had left. A few months later Charles de ideas were undergoing a rapid change on their own. As the art historian Ca- Gaulle would be sworn as the first president of the Fifth Republic, while civil therine Dossin argues in her forthcoming book on the Parisian scene of that war was raging in Algeria. There were significant cultural changes as well, time, by the early 1960s ‘[n]ot only did Western Europeans rely heavily on particularly in the way the French redefined the meaning of their “high cul- the United States economically and politically, they were becoming depen- ture” and contemporary art.7 That shift became clear when, in the following dent on its style, fashion and culture.”15 That “dependency” brought many year, Pierre Restany published the “Constitutive Declaration of New Realism.” more young European artists closer to pop art than to abstract expressio- This manifesto equated New Realism with new ways of perceiving the real, nism, in part because at that time the latter was often perceived to be a de- “not through the prism of conceptual or imaginary transcription” but by de- rivative of European art, whereas the former was considered a genuine aling directly with reality—by which he meant the modern culture of con- American expression. sumption 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 Vigas never directly responded to the calls of American and British pop artists art, the “New Wave” in cinema, the “Nouveau roman” in literature. and French New Realists to bring art close to life by embracing the icono- graphy of consumer culture. Neither did he fully subscribe to the prescriptions Upon Vigas’s return, his style started to change. In this period we encounter of Clement Greenberg, who advocated close attention to the surface of pain- a new Vigas: constructivista turned into a rebellious informalista, as his ap- ting, and a confirmation of the flatness of the canvas, which influenced many proach to painting took a rather dramatic turn, this time toward a gestural artists in the United States and elsewhere. For the Venezuelan artist, such style associated with abstract expressionism, the French equivalent of it ca- flatness derived not so much from the specificity of the medium of pain- 6 | VIGAS INFORMALISTA | 7 ting—a modern concept sui generis—as from the “primordial” aspects of art, to the realm of the beautiful, and ultimately the abstract, whereas for the Ve- which brought him closer to Jean Dubuffet and his treatment of materials nezuelan artist Nature is quintessentially sublime, and therefore much more for making art as “living substances” and to the CoBrA group.16 Subse- “unstable” in terms of being either abstract or figurative. Heavily on the side quently, the surface in Vigas’s paintings in the late 1950s and early 1960s re- of the emotional, Vigas’s art is anti-classical—it belongs to the realm of pas- mained highly visceral, oozing with thick paint while exposing a jarring sion and violence. It is in that dynamic realm that Vigas found a fertile ground self-awareness as part of the act of creation. Many of his paintings from that to grow his forms in the late 1950s and early 1960s: he piles them on top of period emphasize the porous quality of the surface, as well as the brush- each other, layering them like geological cross-sections —Paisaje mítico IV, work; in these works, the paint often behaves as if it were volcanic lava, im- 1959 (FIG. 5)—, or carves them out like crevices filled with organic deposits un- posing its own gravity on the natural terrain of the canvas. But there is also dergoing gradual decomposition —Piedras fértiles XV, 1960 (FIG. 10)—. To con- something highly theatrical in his distortion of the figure, which reinforces vey a sense of the Sublime chromatically, the artist chose a Rembranesque its tragic qualities. Some of the protagonists in Vigas’s paintings might, in palette, rich in blacks, browns, ochres,