El 24 de julio de este año falleció el artista Oswaldo Viteri (Ambato,1931 – Quito, 2023). Como homenaje publicamos un artículo de Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers incluido en el libro 101 ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO ECUADOR Vol. 01 editado el año pasado, y un artículo del mismo autor publicado en el Diccionario Oxford de Artistas (versión en inglés).
A pesar de preservar su estatus como uno de los grandes maestros modernos que ha tenido el país, Viteri fue incluido en dicha publicación por la relevancia cultural que tienen algunas de sus facetas desde la perspectiva de las prácticas contemporáneas.
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Oswaldo Viteri. Serie los forajidos: El Ministerio de Malestar Social. 2005. Ensamblaje, mixta. 160 x 160 cm. Fotografía: Christoph Hirtz
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Oswaldo Viteri
Libro 101 ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO ECUADOR Vol. 01
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La inclusión de uno de los maestros modernos más reconocidos del Ecuador en este compendio sobre arte contemporáneo se hace por dos motivos fundamentales. El primero tiene que ver con el empleo consciente de la investigación antropológica en su trabajo: aunque Viteri nunca descuidó los valores formales a través de los cuales cultivó una gramática de estilo propia, su indagación en torno a las artes populares presagia tempranamente una aproximación interdisciplinaria que caracteriza a muchas prácticas más recientes.
Desarrolló estos estudios entre 1961 y 1967, colaborando además en investigaciones de campo junto al folclorista Paulo de Carvalho-Neto. A partir del año siguiente, sus observaciones pasarían a informar su obra de manera auténtica cuando comenzó a incorporar en sus cuadros las muñecas de trapo que encontraba en los mercados indígenas de la sierra ecuatoriana, y que además adquiría —reducidas en su escala y confeccionadas con retazos— en las llamadas “cajoneras de Santo Domingo”, en el casco colonial de Quito. A más de cumplir una función como juguetes para poblaciones no afluentes, estas muñecas encerraban también códigos rituales y mágicos cuya herencia se puede remontar a tiempos precolombinos. Eran un elemento sincrético perfecto para avanzar sus exploraciones alrededor de la heterogénea identidad del ser americano, andino y mestizo y su realidad en el complejo entramado cultural del país, muy distinta y contrastante en relación a los contextos hegemónicos de occidente. Al incluirlas con un sentido poético como parte de su obra, Viteri elevó estas manifestaciones populares a la esfera del arte, encontrando a su vez una solución al dilema que cerraría la brecha entre sus impulsos como artista y sus inquietudes antropológicas. Este gesto descentró las nociones que se tenía de las muñecas al desplazarlas del ámbito artesanal-popular al de la alta cultura, interrogando así aquellas jerarquías establecidas, algo que posteriormente se convertiría en un rasgo distintivo de la posmodernidad.
El segundo motivo de relevancia para su inclusión es que inscribió en su trabajo -en plena madurez creativa- una crítica política bastante directa y atenta al contexto social; un caso único entre los artistas de su generación. En lugar de refugiarse en la expansión experimental de su poética, manteniendo en ella el grado de autonomía autorreferencial y formalista que habían alcanzado los maestros modernos, Viteri decide hacer lo que ningún otro de su estatus: en el 2005, a sus 75 años -y al igual que decenas de artistas jóvenes- se aplica en una serie que comenta el descalabro gubernamental en el país. Crea representaciones espontáneas de las multitudes en rebeldía que protagonizaron la caída de Lucio Gutiérrez (2003-2005), respondiendo a los hechos de manera muy emocional apenas horas después de lo ocurrido. Utiliza en ellas las mismas muñecas de trapo, que calzan de manera adecuada con el espíritu del tema, para recrear escenas de la llamada Revolución de los Forajidos (tal fue el apelativo que el presidente usó en contra de los manifestantes).
Oswaldo Viteri. Serie los forajidos: Mi poder en la constitución. 2005. Acrílico y pastel sobre madera. 110 cm de diámetro c/u. Fotografías: Christoph Hirtz
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A esta serie se suma un conjunto de “retratos” de presidentes, cuya figuración expresiva deforma y caricaturiza a los personajes al pintarlos sobre tapas circulares de antiguos toneles de madera para almacenar tabaco. Viteri modifica el texto oficial de la banda presidencial, abreviando la frase “Mi poder en la constitución” y dejándola solo en “Mi poder…”. De esa forma señalaba el desvío fundamental que ocurre en la raíz ética del cargo. Este conjunto se exhibió en el Colegio de Arquitectos de Quito (2006) como si fuera un “Salón Amarillo” alternativo, que contrasta con el que se encuentra en el Palacio de Carondelet, sede del gobierno ecuatoriano. También conocida como el “Salón de los Presidentes”, la habitación alberga los retratos de todos los mandatarios de la historia del país.
Si bien no debemos perfilar el trabajo de Viteri como interdisciplinar en su sentido actual, vale tener presente que este cruce que logró de manera intuitiva décadas atrás tiene relación con lo que más adelante en el arte se llamó “giro etnográfico”. En los ensamblajes que desarrolló desde finales de los 60 podemos intuir un interés por un “otro” cultural, que —aunque alejado de las retóricas de subalternidad— prefigura en cierta forma el trabajo de convivencia o cercanía de muchos artistas contemporáneos con comunidades diversas al margen del sistema del arte. La estela de esta deriva en el arte internacional de los años 90 —enfocada en gran medida en sujetos socialmente oprimidos y/o poscoloniales— cobraría tal fuerza y desarrollo (muchas veces sin un debido involucramiento por parte de los artistas), que el teórico Hal Foster problematizó el fenómeno en uno de sus ensayos seminales cuestionando la idea de “¿el artista como etnógrafo?” (1995), colocando inquietudes sobre el paradigma “cuasi-antropológico” del arte en el centro de la agenda de los estudios culturales.
Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers
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Oswaldo Viteri. Geografía de humo. 1968. Ensamblaje. 125 x 84 cm. Col. Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Central, Quito. Fotografía: Christoph Hirtz
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Oswaldo Viteri
Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers
101 ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO ECUADOR
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Viteri, one of Ecuador’s most eminent modern masters, is included in this compendium on contemporary art for two main reasons. The first relates to the conscious use of anthropological research in his work: while he never neglected the formal values through which he developed his own stylistic grammar, his exploration of folk art offered an early pointer to the interdisciplinary approach that informs much of his recent practice.
Viteri studied anthropology between 1961 and 1967, and also carried out field research with folklorist Paulo de Carvalho-Neto. From 1968 onwards, his observations came to provide an authentic underpinning for his own pictures, in which he began to include the rag dolls he had picked up in the indigenous street markets of the Ecuadorean hills, and also purchased – though these dolls were on a smaller scale and made of scraps of cloth – in the Santo Domingo street market in Quito’s colonial quarter. As well as serving as toys for the less affluent, these dolls had ritual and magic connotations dating back to pre-Columbian times. They thus afforded the perfect syncretic element for a deeper exploration of the heterogeneous identity of the American, Andean and mestizo peoples and of their position within Ecuador’s complex cultural fabric, a position contrasting starkly with the hegemonic Western contexts. By endowing them with a poetic sense in his work, Viteri elevated these rag dolls – expression of folk culture – to the realm of art, and thus found a means of bridging the gap between his instincts as an artist and his anthropological concerns. In doing so, he subverted dominant ideas about the dolls, shifting them from the folk/craft sphere into the world of high culture and thereby challenging established hierarchies, an aspiration that was later to become a hallmark feature of postmodernity.
The second key reason for including Viteri is that his work – at the height of his creative maturity – contained fairly direct political criticism clearly arising from the social context; he was the only artist of his generation to adopt this stance. Rather than taking refuge in the experimental expansion of his particular poetics, and retaining the degree of self-referential, formalist autonomy achieved by the modern masters, Viteri made a decision unique for an artist of his status: in 2005, at the age of 75, he applied himself – like dozens of young artists – to a series attacking the country’s disastrous government. His spontaneous portrayals of the massive popular uprising that brought down President Lucio Gutiérrez (2003-2005) offered a highly-emotional response to events that had happened only a few hours earlier. In these works he used the same rag dolls, an appropriate expression of the underlying issues, to recreate scenes from the so-called “Outlaws’ Revolution” (the president had branded the demonstrators “outlaws”).
At the same time, he produced a set of “portraits” of presidents, pointedly painted on the round lids of old wooden barrels used for storing tobacco, their features distorted and caricatured by expressive figuration. Viteri modified the official wording of the presidential sash, shortening “My power in the constitution” to read simply “My power”. In doing so, he highlighted a fundamental breach of the ethical code underpinning the post. The set of portraits was exhibited at the Colegio de Arquitectos in Quito (2006) as though it were an alternative “Yellow Room”, contrasting with its original counterpart – also known as the “Presidents’ Room”, since it contains portraits of all the country’s presidents – in the Palacio de Carondelet, seat of Ecuador’s government.
Although Viteri’s work should not be labelled “interdisciplinary” in the current sense of the term, the dual approach which he had developed decades earlier in a wholly intuitive manner, chimes with what would later be called the “ethnographic turn” in art. The assemblages he produced from the late 1960s onwards hint at his interest in cultural otherness, which – though far removed from the rhetoric of subalternity – in a way prefigures the close contact of many contemporary artists with various communities sidelined by the art system. This trend in international art during the 1990s – focused largely on socially oppressed and/or post-colonial subjects –acquired such strength, and became so highly-developed (often without proper involvement by the artists themselves) that the art critic Hal Foster was led to address the issue in a seminal essay challenging the notion of “the artist as ethnographer” (1995), placing concerns regarding the “quasi-anthropological” paradigm at the heart of the cultural studies agenda.
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Oswaldo Viteri y Rodolfo Kronfle, 2012.
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Texto por Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers para el Diccionario Oxford de Artistas
Viteri, Oswaldo
(b Ambato, Oct 8, 1931)
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Ecuadorian painter, draftsman and muralist. Mostly self-taught he trained under the guidance of immigrant modernist painters, with the Dutch Jan Schreuder (1955) and specially with the American Lloyd Wulf (1955-59), a friendship that had a deep impact on him. In 1957 he graduated as an architect at the Universidad Central del Ecuador in Quito, although he didn’t truly see himself as one.
His characteristic style of flat colors on which he would accommodate areas of thick paint would gain him early notoriety. In 1960 he won the grand prize at the Salón Mariano Aguilera with Man, House and Moon, with which he expressed an ongoing attempt to grasp an amerindian cosmovision, as well as a desire to move beyond the anecdotal figuration of ecuadorian social-realist art. For a brief period he developed an Ancestralist (or “Pre-Columbian”) phase, during which he poetically evoked the continent’s pre-colonial past (Symbols series, 1960; Origin, 1961). He was an early adopter of this movement that challenged the supremacy of well established Indigenist painters such as Kingman and Guayasamin, but by the mid-1960s his work turned to gestural abstraction which channeled inner feelings, using a bright ochre and crimson palette against dark backgrounds. These experiments could be linked to the freedom, drama and vigor of Spanish informalism of the previous decade.
Significant influences on this change were his studies of zen buddhism (instilled by Wulf), as was the contact, in a visit to Spain in 1969, with the post-expressionist style of polish artist Pinchas Burstein (1927-1977), also known as Maryan S. Maryan, that informs and weighs heavily on his neo-figurative drawings of the late sixties onwards.
1968 marks a new turning point thanks in part to his fieldwork in numerous andean communities alongside folklorist Paulo de Carvalho-Neto. Viteri had moved on to a groundbreaking crossover between art and anthropology creating truly original assemblages that departed radically with his previous painting styles. Although he used newspaper clippings and cement bags, reminiscent of an international assemblage and collage styles, he also produced landscape-like compositions that used folk elements such as rag dolls, hemp weaves and the golden ornaments of ecclesiastical vestments applied directly on the surface of his canvases, which speak of the hybridity derived from Latin America’s colonial process (We Are Wanderers of the Night and of Suffering, 1979; Quito, artist’s col.). A certain air of andean magic and obscure rites derive from their symbolisms, while the sophisticated esthetic qualities of the compositions were from any attempt to mimic reality. Throughout the decade and up to the present day he has continued to use his characteristic rag dolls coupled with new background textures such as volcanic ash. Parallel series of works throughout his career focus on nudes and his longtime bullfight passion.
Towards the later phase of his career his art has included political commentary, such as a long series of figurative paintings from the 1990’s until well into the 21st century called “Los desastres de las guerras” (The disasters of wars), which invoked Goya to comment on the suffering derived from the state of world affairs. He also developed an important series of round paintings on wood called “Los forajidos” (2005) which tackled current socio-political issues in Ecuador’s fragile democracy. He was the only modern master in the country that seemed to engage with present day events, such as the masses that led the upheavals that toppled corrupt governments.
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Bibliography
- Viteri (exh. cat., Madrid, Club Int. Prensa, 1969)
- M. TRABA: Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–1970 (Mexico City, 1973), p. 43
- H. RODRÍGUEZ CASTELO: Viteri (Ediciones Libri Mundi-Enrique Grosse Luemern & Grupo Santillana, 2008)
- H. RODRÍGUEZ CASTELO: Diccionario Crítico de Artistas Plásticos del Ecuador del Siglo XX (Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Quito, 1992)
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See also
Ecuador, §IV, 2: Painting, graphic arts and sculpture, after 1822
