The painter of the “Witches” at the MAM

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MEXICO CITY (apro).– Scheduled to end on the same day that the art fair week in Mexico City comes to an end – Sunday, February 11 –, the exhibition “Oswaldo Vigas. Looking Inward” which is presented at the Museum of Modern Art of this capital, although it stands out for the excellence and pictorial vigor of the works it exhibits, it also disappoints due to the partiality and lack of originality of its curatorial concept.

Recognized as one of the Latin American artists who assumed his mestizo identity by linking modern art aesthetics with allusions to the original cultures of his own country – unlike others who, like his compatriot Carlos Cruz Diez (Venezuela 1923-France 2019) developed abstract proposals without localist references–, Oswaldo Vigas confirms the importance that professional construction of artistic value currently has. An activity that has been successfully undertaken by the foundation named after the artist, directed by his son, the filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas.
Created in 2010, when the painter was 87 years old, the foundation has encouraged the promotion of his work by collaborating in exhibitions, publications and, in 2023, with the online presence of an excellent catalog raisonné that covers his entire creative career, from 1940 to 2014. Organized from images that each contain references to exhibitions and texts, the catalog is a great support for the study, interpretation and commercialization of the artist.

Oswaldo Vigas was born in 1923 and also died in his country in 2014. He belongs to the generation of artists who, in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, were defined and differentiated by the market and art historiography under the ambivalent term of art. Latin American. Trained in his native land and with long stays in Europe, especially in France, the artists from Latin America acquired in those years a collective artistic identity that has been as positive as it is negative. With languages differentiated between internationalists and those with references to regional imaginaries, Vigas is part of the latter, like the Mexican Rufino Tamayo, the Cuban Wifredo Lam, the Peruvian Fernando de Szyszlo and the Chilean Roberto Matta.

Curated by the Venezuelan Carlos Palacios, the exhibition “Oswaldo Vigas. Look inside”, concentrates his narrative on the poetic links with pre-Hispanic and African imaginaries that the artist's pictorial language has.

Located between objects from these cultures that belong to the creator's collection and linked photographic images, the exhibition presents a tour of the work carried out from the 1940s until his death, integrating pieces by the aforementioned artists.
Of his emblematic “Brujas” inspired by the fascinating pre-Hispanic sculptures called Venus de Tacarigua, only one is exhibited, “Bruja infante” from 1951. Also from that period is the important painting “Yare”, in which the painter decants the shapes peaks of the masks used in the religious festival of the dancing devils of Yare. Two pieces in which the expressionist vigor of “outsider” (marginal or brut) poetics of Vigas' pictorial gesture is evident.

Throughout his career, the vocabulary he developed was not limited to figuration, and references to modern poetics such as cubism, metaphysical painting, surrealism and, above all, different types of expressionism, characterize the proposal of he. And even though the exhibition limits his narrative to localist references, the pieces reveal aesthetics of the Cobra Group, Dubuffet's Art Brut and aesthetics of North American Expressionism.

Divided into three sections that respond to the titles of “In search of the primitive”, “Looking at Venezuela” and “Latin America and the local: time of myths and magic”, the exhibition, although repeating the stereotype of considering Latin America As a magical and fantastic territory, it also offers a pictorial proposal of international excellence.