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Marco Antonio Rodríguez * "I'm going to die with a brush in my hand and a musical score on my pillow," says Oswaldo Viteri, the master of mixed Latin American plastic arts, while in his eyes he There is a big sad child who has always lived there. But he smiles, and in this gesture manifests another sign of his cyclonic personality: his civil and human strength.

Never did the artist lower his neck to power. His visual creation was imposed by his grandeur, one of the most prominent of Hispanic-American art of the twentieth century, without resorting to the entourage of spectators and merchants accompanying many comparsa who exudes the greed of many great artists. There is no loneliness more extensive than that of the creators who have acceded to the highest whirlpools of the mind: this is the case of Viteri.

Augustine of Hippo knew what time was, but if anyone asked what it was, he lacked the answer. Why does this "confession" of Augustine come to my mind? Because I do not know if at this moment I entered the cellars of the house of the ancestors of Viteri, where, as a child, he was locked up, and by tightening and opening his eyes, he imbibed in his being the indelible lesson of the black and white. Casualisme? In any case, premonitory adventure of what would be the way to solve his life and his work. The black and white melting into a single bewitching concussion.

A Unique Element
Karl Jaspers warned that in great minds there is always an element of witchcraft. Who could deny that it's overflowing into Viteri's great work? Black and white Life and death. Love and lack of love. Good and evil. The sacred and the profane. The black and white, the pure states of pictorial art, and also of life. Immolation and jubilation, a work that progresses towards its own comment, which integrates its elucidation: its double language. Viteri conceives the material line badimilated to a language-object (rag dolls, arpilleras, chasubles, cannabis, medals …), in the case of its bademblages which condense our crossbreeding or the density of matter in its other expressions …

Embarquement
No artist of his generation has plunged so much into the labyrinths of the human condition. (Which museum of the world will your "Disasters of wars", exalted and atrocious testimony of what we are so that in this fresco the humanity will be seen in the times to come?). "When I was twelve, I knew how to draw like Rafael, but I needed a lifetime to learn to paint like a child," Picbado said. Viteri was born with this extraordinary gift? I think so. From one shot of blood, he erects a bad, a bullfight, a zen … that obscures the observer. "The air that exists in the drawings is the best of the drawings," wrote Viteri in the early part of the seventies, "but it is necessary to make many drawings to make it transparent."

NOTE
The gallery is open from Tuesday to Friday from 9:30 to 13:30 and from 15:00 to 19:00. Saturdays from 10:00 to 17:00 The pictorial art begins as soon as a work is completed or that a cycle is exhausted – a series, in the case of the grand master, his collages, his " Disasters of wars, "his bullfights, his" Cabezas ", his" Nus ". … – and refines, instantly to start another job or another step. The Viteri creative route is a true reflection of this statement. From here also its size. Viteri never stopped looking, she never stopped in what was done. Without more rest than himself, without more joy and suffering than himself, without more rebellion and tranquility than himself, he spreads the terrible wonder of life which is his supreme pictorial work

Solitudes and crowds (his genius creatures of their Spanish cycle or their dolls badembled in their bademblies, sum and essence of miscegenation), spasmodic confirmations of the century that he lived (his historical series The disasters of wars), love and lack of love, forgotten and uninformed, denial and certainty of everything and everything, his unique and sacrificial expedition at the end of his journey to the heart.

There is in the Zen texts an element called "ko-tzu & # 39; which signifies this great spontaneity of which we must accuse this exceptional artist: domain of an original knowledge of the world, of humanity and things. This precision leads to a better understanding of the superb creation of Oswaldo Viteri, the immense artist who gave the world to Ecuador and America.

A brush pursues me like a luminous soul when I leave his house-museum, and a melody – Falling from the sky and coming out of the bowels of the earth – sneaks into the ears of my soul.

* Ecuadorian writer and critic

The artist

In detail

Tribute

Ileana Viteri

… I n could have prevented me from building this small sample after visiting the new National Museum. What happiness, on the one hand, has allowed me to find the wealth of archeology in dialogue with colonial art, with republican and modern art, and also in the dialogue between them, approaching and I suppose, once again, our sense of belonging, of being and of being in time and in this space of the earth in the middle of the American world, which is also a space to do and create not only with the hands but with the mind or the conscience.