The Venezuelan artist Jesus-Rafael Soto, who died in 2005, was one of the leading figures in the development of kinetic art in Europe. The gift by the artist's family of 20 key works makes it possible to reconstruct his career. The exhibition traces his journey from his first Plexiglas reliefs of the 1950s to the monumental volumes of the years from 1990-2000.
curator of the exhibition Jean-Paul Ameline
Le Centre Pompidou pays tribute to the Venezuelan artist Jesús-Rafael Soto, who died in 2005,
one of the leading figures in the development of kinetic art in Europe in the second half of the
20th century.
Paradoxically, until now Jesús-Rafael Soto was little represented in French public collections.
The gift to the State by the artist’s family in 2011 of twenty key works dating from 1955 to 2004,
is an outstanding group which makes it possible to reconstruct the career of a major artist,
famous for his Penetrables. The exhibition traces his journey from his first Plexiglas reliefs of
the 1950s to the monumental volumes of the years from 1990-2000.
Living in Paris from 1950, the artist developed a body of work in constant dialogue with
the founders of abstraction, Mondrian, Malevitch and Moholy-Nagy, and with his contempories
Agam, Pol Bury, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri. From the 1960s, Soto achieved
an international reputation and exhibited in London, Krefeld, Berne, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris
and elsewhere.
From 1979 the Centre Pompidou has presented the artist’s latest works. In 1987, an emblematic
work entitled Volume virtuel [Virtual volume], was commissioned from Soto by the Association
des Amis du Centre Pompidou [Friends of the Centre Pompidou] on the occasion of the
institution’s 10th anniversary. This monumental work was to remain in the Centre’s Forum for
10 years, testifying to the close relationship forged between the institution and the artist.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Éditions du Centre Pompidou,
edited by Jean-Paul Ameline, curator of the exhibition.
CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION
The Soto donation provides the opportunity to comprehend the rigour and subtlety of a body of work
tirelessly constructed in dialogue with both the great pioneers of abstract art, Mondrian, Malevich
and Moholy-Nagy, and his contemporaries, primarily Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. Indeed, Soto’s first
Paris paintings exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles of 1951, the year fafter he moved to Paris,
already demonstrate his intention to “make Mondrian move”.
His first exhibited works were serial paintings, intended to break away from the canonical rules
of abstract composition and to arrange a rhythmic succession of colours and forms and suggest their
optical movement. In 1953, after Soto had discovered the work of Moholy-Nagy in books, he used
Plexiglas (Perspex) to make his new abstract works. Motifs in these works are repeated twice, first on
wood, then on a Plexiglas panel placed 20 cm in front. Soto thus brought about “perceptual explosions”
which would develop in the following years. These explosions, as Soto hoped, liberated geometric forms
and planes of colour from their static state. They seem to vibrate and move.
In 1955, Soto was invited by Denise René and Vasarely to exhibit his first Plexiglas pieces in
“Le Mouvement” exhibition. Here he saw Marcel Duchamp’s motorised Rotary demisphere which in the
following months inspired him to make his Plexiglas Spiral. This is in fact in two parts: a black spiral
occupies the background of the wooden panel on which it is painted and allows a painted white spiral to
appear on a sheet of Plexiglas placed in the foreground. As the viewer’s gaze moves it creates the illusion
that the spiral is rotating.
Prolific in the number of Plexiglas works made (a total of 38), nonetheless Soto stopped making them in
1958, refusing to allow his exploration to be identified with a material. It was at this time that he adopted
metal in the form of thin tubes or monochrome squares against hand-painted black and white striped
backgrounds. Treated in this way, rods and squares placed in front of these striped backgrounds
seem to take on an illusory instability. This aspiration to make the work of art not a finished set of subtly
composed forms and colours, but a means of introducing a moving reality, brought the artist closer to
both the new Parisian realists and the Germans of the Zero group (Mack, Piene, Uecker, etc.) with whom
he exhibited many times in these years from 1960-1965.
From 1959-1962, scrap iron, usually found, would be reused by Soto for his works. This was what some
critics were to call his “baroque” period. Then close to Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely, Soto visited
scrap metal dealers and flea markets and then tried to prove that he could “dissolve” any metal with the
aid of his striped backgrounds and make it dematerialise through optical vibration.
From 1963, Soto abandoned found materials. His first installations using new wire curved into
unpredictable shapes appear as a counterpoint to straight lines on an evenly painted background:
These are the Escrituras. At the same time, Soto also began to use rods suspended from nylon
threads in front of striped backgrounds. This is, finally, about having found the “pure vibration” released
by the poetry of found materials. The solutions he developed will be long-lasting. Their classicism
intentionally distinguishes them from the optical games shown in the Op Art exhibitions. Opposing such
events, Soto, through his works, puts the emphasis on revealing the kinetic nature of the real, marked
by the threefold dimension of space-time-material.
Thus in 1967, he hung his first Penetrable at the Denise René gallery with the idea of including himself
– and the visitor with him – in the midst of rods suspended from the ceiling. Viewers could perceive
the work optically from outside or pass through it and place themselves inside the piece thus created
by getting involved and becoming an integral part of it.
Thus, Suspended Volume (1968) offered as a donation, is one of the group of early works involving the
viewer. With its three elements (a wall panel of painted lines restored after Soto’s death, a first vertical
volume of blue painted rods and a second vertical volume of black painted rods), it is the missing link
in Soto’s work between the pre 1967 works (in which optical vibration dominates) and the Penetrables
in the strict sense in which the viewer’s perception is as much tactile as visual.
“With the Penetrable” said Soto, “we are no longer observers but constituent parts of the real.
Man is no longer here and the world there. He is fully there and it is this feeling that I want to create
with my enveloping works. It isn’t about driving people mad, about stunning them with optical effects.
It’s about getting people to understand that we are steeped in the trinity of space-time-material”.
After 1975, Soto’s work went through one last evolution. While kinetic art was eclipsed by the current
trends in art, Soto, while generously responding to commissions for public artworks and assisting
with numerous retrospective exhibitions in museums, gave his work a new rigour by returning to reliefs
in which coloured squares again play an essential role.
During the 1980s, a series of works drew on Soto’s investigations: this is the series, Ambivalences, the
product of his reflections on the last period of Mondrian’s work, which culminates in the Boogie Woogie
series in which colour explodes into hundreds of tiny squares arranged over the canvas. Like Mondrian,
Soto arranged his coloured squares over striped backgrounds, placing them both in opposition to them
and as counterpoints to others. Each colour, painted on squares of different sizes (but all located in the
same plane of the picture), seems to react to its neighbours in its own way and give the viewer the optical
sensation that the square painted in it projects to a greater or lesser degree from the background of the
picture.
It is evident that the Soto donation, in its breadth and diversity and the museum quality of the works
offered, at last endows French public collections with an essential reference archive on one of the
internationally recognised major figures in kinetic art.
Image: Spirale, 1955. Paint on wood and plexiglas, metal 30 x 30 x 28 cm Donation, 2011. Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Georges Merguerditchian / Dist. RMN-GP © Adagp, Paris 2013
Press Officer:
Anne-Marie Pereira tel +33 (0)1 44784069 e-mail anne-marie.pereira@centrepompidou.fr
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Admission
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