Kwai Fung Hin is pleased to present The Voice in the Mirror, a solo exhibition of Oswaldo Vigas (1923 – 2014) that examines the Venezuelan modern artist’s renewed take on figuration after his return to his home country from Paris in 1964. Featuring his diverse media of paintings, sculptures, ceramics and tapestries, the exhibition highlights the depth and breadth of Vigas’s artistic practice in the second half of his career. Following his first solo exhibition in Asia last year which introduced Vigas’s impressive career spanning 70 years, The Voice in the Mirror brings the focus to the continuous reinventions of his mythical figures in his mature period, taking a closer look at one of the defining figures in Latin American modern art.
The reconnection to his homeland led Vigas into a deeper search for the spiritual force of the continent, which the artist perceived as a living being rooted in the oldest belief in Latin American culture. As if there was a need to give the ancient voice a bodily presence, Vigas entered into a period of neo-figuration, presenting his vision of Latin America where the enchanted universe of his ancestors and the modern reality coexist, reflecting each other like a mirror image. In the next four decades of creative outpouring, his mythical figures would continue to morph into different forms with different materials. The works on view demonstrate the artist’s tireless creative spirit in tracing his lineage through a remarkable expressive range.
“The fabulous characters of our indigenous world … the fantastic in our tradition, almost disappeared… the tradition of an America that is no longer visible or written. Everything must resurface, as in the poetry of the Peruvian César Vallejo.” – Oswaldo Vigas
Drawn from the title of César Vallejo’s poem, The Voice in the Mirror illustrates the overlapping of myths and reality, past and present, modern and ancient cultures in Vigas’s mystical world. The exhibition demonstrates the artist’s expressive power to unite the rapidly transforming world with the mestizo traditions and magical dimension of Venezuelan cultural heritage through his versatile practice. Without sharing Vallejo’s pessimism, Vigas articulates the same elusive truth of the modern world and proposes the contemporaneous relevance of indigenous cosmology. Connecting the visible and invisible, the physical and metaphysical, Vigas conjured his figures in the image of the mysterious cosmos closely connected to the ancient world. He once described himself as a shaman; his work is a magical mirror that can reveal what we choose to overlook and also evoke the unknowable, reestablishing both our corporeal and spiritual connection to nature.
