Jorge de la Vega painted Derviche the year Otra figuración formed, and the painting clearly signaled both his belief in the value of the human figure and his interest in styles such as abstract expressionism and art informel or tachisme. The term “otra figuración” derives in part from “l’art autre,” coined in 1952 by French critic Michel Tapié who championed informalism. Tapié would later engage De la Vega and his colleagues during their Paris sojourn in 1962, but the aggressive brushstrokes, frenzied activity, and seemingly haphazard coloration of Derviche demonstrate the artist’s interest in individualism that Tapié considered central to informalism. Tapié called for “authentic individuals” who dared to renounce the past and embrace the uncertainty of the future. De la Vega used a gestural tangle of strokes and drips, all of which refer back to the artist’s singular handling of the paint to construct a mercurial figure, whose eyes, mouth, and even limbs are vaguely discernible in the composition. The confused anatomy of Derviche is similar in some respects to the fragmentary bodies in the work of Antoni Tàpies or Willem de Kooning, but De la Vega’s title provides an indication of the visual confusion. “Derviche” (dervish or darvesh) refers to a Sufi Muslim who lives an ascetic life but also seeks spiritual ecstasy through extreme physical exertion. The characteristic whirling dance of the dervish provided De la Vega not only with a metaphor for the frenetic approach to painting but also an allusion to the spiritual and emotional release derived from artistic activity.
Jorge de la Vega was born in Buenos Aires and began painting in 1951 after studying architecture briefly at Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 1959 he met Luis Felipe Noé and Rómulo Macció and was introduced to informalism by artist Alberto Greco. In 1961 the exhibition Otra figuración at the Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires showcased the new work of four Argentine artists—De la Vega, Macció, Noé, and Ernesto Deira—committed to both abstraction and the human figure. They explained that the human figure was vital to art and they repudiated indirectly the tendency of International Constructivism and informalism to eliminate the figure and all representational subject matter from art. Together, they formed the most notable exponent of Nueva figuración, a broader movement in Latin American art to return to the human form. Following the formation of the group Otra Figuración, De la Vega and his three colleagues left for Paris in 1962. The OAS was quick to acknowledge this new tendency with the 1962 exhibition Neo-Figurative Painting in Latin America. José Gómez Sicre then offered De la Vega a solo exhibition in 1963 and, in that same year, the artist began his Los monstruos or Bestiario series. After the award of a Fulbright Scholarship in 1965, de la Vega visited New York City and served as a visiting professor at Cornell University. This also led to his inclusion in The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Paintings in the 1960s, organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Cornell University. De la Vega began producing psychedelic paintings in 1966, but soon abandoned painting for music. He died prematurely in 1971.
