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14/1/2015

Jesus Rafael Soto

Galerie Perrotin, New York

curated by Matthieu Poirier

Galerie Perrotin presents “Chronochrome,” a double exhibition dedicated to Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005), held simultaneously in its Paris and New York spaces. Organised in collaboration with the artist’s estate and curated by Matthieu Poirier, the exhibition will present some sixty works from his estate or from institutions, made between 1957 and 2003. This two-part exhibition continues the current international rediscovery of Soto, which is illustrated by the recent retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou (2013), and by his inclusion in “Dynamo. A Century of Light and Movement in Art. 1913-2013” at Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (2013), as well as in the current “ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in the Frank Lloyd Wright building where Soto had a major retrospective back in 1974.

For Soto, colour is experienced in and for itself only in the real time and space of perception. The term “chronochrome” is used less in its original sense (it was a process for making colour films, invented in 1912) than to describe the kinetic exploration of the monochrome. Soto was a close friend of Yves Klein, but in Soto’s work, pure colour leaves the stable support of the surface in order to become a vibratory phenomenon.

Jesús Rafael Soto was born in Venezuela in 1923. He trained at art school in Caracas and came to Paris in 1950, which remained his base for the rest of his life. His work developed gradually from his first Parisian pieces, created partly under the influence of the Neoplasticism of Piet Mondrian and the theories of Laszló Moholy- Nagy on light and transparency in his writings Vision in Motion.

In the 1950s he conceived his first “optical vibrations,” the constituting principle that would remain active in almost all his future work: a play of grids on two distinct levels, a few centimetres apart. The first of these levels is irregular and transparent and constituted by either silkscreened motifs or painted rods, and the second, behind it, has fine painted vertical lines in black and white. This relation between foreground and background is crucial: visually, it generates an undulating, changing effect (moiré) every time the beholder’s viewpoint shifts, even if just a little. From then on, Soto abandoned two-dimensional painting in favour of these “reliefs” in which that interstice between the two layers plays such an important role, and for sculptural pieces in which a “rain” of coloured rods or threads create a complex immaterial effect that contrasts with the simplicity of the material elements, just as the rhythmic mobility of the vibration belies the neutrality of the colour.

The properties of the work thus vary with the angle from which it is viewed, creating a motor effect in the observer and integrating the elasticity of perception. This dynamic quality was often misunderstood in Soto’s early work, as it was in the art of Heinz Mack and Bridget Riley. Soto was alternatively heralded as the hero of “kinetic art” or “op art”—a status he regularly rejected as he sought to establish his singularity. Even if he declined the invitation to feature in “The Responsive Eye” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1965 because of what he saw as an excessive prominence given to Victor Vasarely and his purely “optical” paintings, his approach nevertheless fits within the context of what the show’s curator, William Seitz, termed “perceptual abstraction”: a new kind of art rather based on phenomenology, which made spatio-visual perception a medium in its own right, thereby breaking with the expressionist, informel or concrete regimes of the abstraction then in fashion.

“Chronochrome” also echoes the exhibition of Soto at the ARC / Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1969. In the catalogue to that show, Jean Clay stressed the highly spiritual dimension of the “radical dematerialisation” undertaken by the artist. He quoted Kazimir Malevich’s attack on the theoretical framework that, according to him, governed the new abstract painting of the day. “Malevich’s prophecy, made in 1919, is being fulfilled,” stated Clay. “‘Whoever makes abstract constructions, based on the mutual relations of colours within the picture is still confined to the world of aesthetics, rather than bathing in philosophy.’” Whether in the radical abstraction of the Suprematist painter, or that of the Kinetic artist, the aim was to escape the logic of pictorial confinement. The work was to be “open”—to borrow the expression coined by Umberto Eco with regard to kinetic art. Jean Clay seemed to see Soto’s Penetrables (1967 onwards) as the extreme incarnation of this logic, arguing that the ”rain” of fine, translucent and coloured plastic rods were the ultimate development of the “ambiguous space” that had first emerged in the first plexiglas reliefs of the 1950s.

The works brought together at Galerie Perrotin in Paris and New York may disconcert, disorient and seem elusive. The eye—and also the body in the case of one Penetrable—is subtly trapped, wandering endlessly in spaces that oscillate between painting and sculpture, object and image. In the way it enters our perceptual space and refuses to be fully grasped, a work by Soto is, as Henri Bergson would put it, an object that no one has seen and that no one ever will see in its totality. Whether with a wall relief, a sculpture or an environment, the artist invites us to have an experience that is always unique, new every time: the experience of an incompleteness, a space- time continuum that can never be summed up in an image or verbal account. This may be the prime quality of the monochrome staccato in which traditional painting and sculpture are singularly subverted and become atomised in time and space. This unique aesthetic makes Soto a major figure not only in the history of abstraction, but also in the greater history of modern and contemporary art.

Image: Jesus Rafael Soto

Press Contact:
Adam Abdalla, Nadine Johnson +212 228 5555 / adam@nadinejohnson.com

Opening: Thursday, January 15, 6-8pm

Galerie Perrotin
909 Madison Avenue
New York
Tue - Sat 10am to 6pm

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