Jesús Rafael SOTO (Ciudad Bolívar 1923 - Paris, France 2005)

Jesús Rafael SOTO

was a Venezuelan op and kinetic artist, a sculptor and a painter.

His works can be found in the collections of the main museums of the world, including Tate (London), Museum Ludwig (Germany), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Roma) and MoMA (New York). One of the main museums of art in Venezuela, in his home town, has his name in tribute to him.

In 1942 he received a scholarship to study artistic training at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas (Plastic and Applied Arts School) in caracas, finishing his studies in 1947. Once there, he took classes in "Pure art" and the "training course for instructors in art education history." The director of the school, Antonio Edmundo Monsanto, was instrumental to Soto's career as well as other very important Venezuelan artist (Omar Carreño, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Narsico Deboug, Dora Hersen, Mateo Manaure, Luis Guevara, Pascual Navarro, Mercedes Pardo and Alejandro Otero) since he often brought inspirations from foreign countries to his students, including the latest from the avant-garde: cubism.

"When I got in the Fine Arts School, the first thing I saw was the reproduction of a dead nature of Braque" This image caused such impact on him because "...the color started to separate of the form" and because of the multiplicity of the viewing points that he wanted to represent. For Soto, this was the starting point.

After Soto had graduated from Escuela de Artes Plasticas y Artes Aplicadas, receiving a teaching degree, he was then hired to be the director of the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo from 1947 to 1950. When he was teaching there, he received a government grant to travel to France, and settled in Paris.

In France, Soto discovered Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian's work, and the latter suggested the idea of 'dynamizing the neoplasticism'. This, joined with Soto's will to create a new sort of movement that would add to three dimensional art concluded in associations with Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, Vitor Vasarely, and other artists connected with the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Galerie Denise René.

In the beginning, Soto painted post-impressionist works, latter getting interested in Cubism. After getting in touch with Malevich, Mondrian and the constructivists, Soto started to experiment with optical phenomena and op art and then he began to make art that was more than just pictures.

The first serial works

In the 1950s, Soto experimented with serial art: the repetition of formal elements in the plan, the depersonalization of the work and the revelation of the relativity of the vision. He achieved the reproduction of vibratory phenomena and, above all, the rupture of notions like composition and equilibrium. Making the work of art a fragment of an infinite reality, that could be repeated without varying its essential structure. Without a beginning, an end, up, down, right, left. Helped by notions from the mathematics and music fields, Soto makes his serial art.

Incorporation of time and real movement

The next step on Soto's works was incorporating time and real movement through the treatment of the space. The work should be an autonomous object, where "real" situations were put into play, and not a plan where a determinate vision projected. At the same time that the spectator was moving in front of the work of art, to obtain from it is optical vibrational effects, time and real movement were being incorporated.

Dematerialization of form

As results of the optical vibratory states that Soto achieves from the superposition of plans, a new situation appears: the outbreak of the solid body, its dematerialization in our retina, phenomena that is produced for the first time in Permutación (1956). In Estructuras cinéticas de elementos geométricos (1955-57) and Armonía transformable (1956) is added a new element that was relegated in his research: color. It is about the superposition of different plexiglass produced here. Its structure already suggests a true spatial dimension, as a consequence of the equivalence of its obverse and its reverse. The situation becomes more complex, due to the multiplication of diferent lines, colors, and directions. Plexiglass, medium that had provided the possibility of conforming aleatory states, begins to be an impediment and the search for a new way of materializing vibration starts.

The conformation of a new visual order

To the preoccupation of searching for a new way of materializing the vibratory states is added the concern to approach human scale, integrating Soto's works to architecture. This is how in Estructura Cinética (1957) the frames that had been drawn on plexiglass become real elements: metal rods welded between them. Soto's works become real special objects that visitors are able to penetrate.

In the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, starting from his basic concept of matter and space as different manifestations of energy, Soto had already structured the conceptual platform of his plastic language.

"My work of art, is totally abstract. It was born from a reflection about painting and the propositions of our biggest. I don't copy nature, I isolate fundamental properties of the reality. For me, works are, before all, signs, no matter. It would be wrong to see in the work that is in front of you the object of my art, it isn't there if not as a witness, sign of another thing..."

Space plenitude

All of Soto's work, from start to end, answers to the same necessity of materialize his concept of the world as an impossible reality to measure in a human scale; vision where are vital the energy and space as essential situations inside nature. To reveal this situations in all of its complex dimension was the impulse that has fed his plastic research.

"When you enter a penetrable, you have the sensation of being in a light swirl, a total plenitude of vibrations. The Penetrable is a kind of concretization of this plenitude in which I make people move and make them feel the body of space. Is a way of materializing what exist, is an immaterial state, one state that for me isn't irreal, but a reality. Reality exists all over the place and fill all the universe. Emptiness doesn't exist, anywhere. This is my basic line of thought. "

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