“I consider Art with a capital A (and I use the term unashamedly) not as a way of speculating about beauty, but above all as a form of knowledge, a kind of sensitive thought embedded in the general context of a culture that it directly helps to create.”
Dazzling and destabilizing, Jesús Rafael Soto’s Untitled of 1961 marks a critical moment in the artist’s body of work. Executed at the height of the seminal period of his production that art historian Alfredo Boulton referred to as “Baroque,” it is a masterwork; its monochromatic elegance and transformational optical power form a testament to Soto’s masterful ability to make the transient concrete.
In 1950 Jesus Rafael Soto left his native Venezuela for Paris on a government scholarship, joining a wave of artists from across the Americas and Europe who flooded the French capital in the wake of the second World War. Upon arrival, Soto immersed himself in burgeoning participatory, abstract avant-garde movements like Nouveau réalisme and later ZERO, exhibiting at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, and later in gallerist Denise Rene’s seminal Le Mouvement with Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, and many others.
Having arrived in Paris a painter, seeking to take up the abstract mantle of Mondrian and Malevich, Soto quickly discarded the tradition not only of a two-dimensional format but of “the purported sanctity of the work of art - understood as a contemplative reflection of a single universality and the product of a unique perspective - and stressed the collaborative nature of an artistic project that was not fixed in space or time, but rather in flux and constantly shifting.” (Estrellita Brodsky, “Relocating the Dislocated” in Soto: Paris and Beyond 1950-1970, Exh. Cat., New York, Grey Gallery, 2012, p.12) He sought to bring the artistic project into the temporality of the viewer; exploring “the activation of spatial dynamism and sensorial instability through the techniques of collage and superimposition” (ibid, p. 23), he began working in Plexiglas in the late 1950s, executing a series of works comprised of multiple planes with varying degrees of transparency that allow light to constantly change the surface of the work. These Estructuras cinéticas (Kinetic Structures) activate color and line in three dimensions and real time in glittering, ephemeral impressions, bringing the flat Boogie-Woogies of Mondrian off of the canvas and into the living moment. In Paris’ avant-garde of 1957, a debate flourished between so-called “cold abstraction” and expressive, gestural movements born of the turmoil of the previous decade (including Tachisme and Art informel). Soto found himself at a crossroads of these vocabularies alongside artists like Gunther Uecker, Heinz Mack, and Yves Klein -- all of whom sought a new path forward for visual art, in which the line between spectator and spectacle was erased.
Like many of his ZERO and Nouveau réaliste contemporaries (in particular Yves Klein), Soto was heavily influenced during this period by the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard asserted that human knowledge was “a temporal progression in which new truths build upon the past...scientific law should be considered a mutable thing, a progress of thought. Even more important than knowledge in its current state..is the shift in knowledge, the event of knowledge’s changing, as well as the consequent awareness that knowledge is a historical thing.” (Sarah K. Rich, “Soto and You” in ibid., p. 47) This emphasis on the instability of knowledge and the importance of the moment in which knowledge changes is essential to understanding Soto’s work in the critical period between 1958-1962, to which the present work belongs, “which put perceptual change to work not merely as a means of entertaining the viewer or providing a momentary thrill of destabilization, but as a way of promoting a certain understanding of knowledge itself.” (ibid.)
Departing from the serialized vocabulary of the Estructuras cineticas, Soto responded to the industrial aesthetics and chance-based methods of Nouveau réalisme and ZERO with a body of works that resolved “an unpaid debt to painting” (Jesús Soto in Jesús Soto in conversation with/en conversación con Ariel Jiménez, New York 2013, p. 80). “The idea was to take insignificant but strongly formal objects (old wood, wire, needles, gratings and pipes), integrate them into the work and bring them to a state of disintegration through pure vibration...My problem was to incorporate any element of everyday life and dematerialize it.” (ibid., pp. 73-74) These objects, including relief works like Untitled and a group of sculptures built from found wood (Leños), are temporal experiences embodied. Here Soto employs the plastic language of Europe’s avant-garde to force the viewer not just to experience a complex optical illusion, but to become fully conscious of the experience of viewing a work of art at a specific, fleeting moment in time.
Just as the form of the Baroque works was guided by chance, so too was their construction. In 1958 Soto moved with his young wife Hélène to a small apartment on the Rue du Temple, where he made a fateful discovery. “The apartment had previously belonged to an artisan who made lampshades, and we found the storeroom full of beautiful metal structures. When I saw these lovely structures I didn’t want to throw them all away, so I held onto a group of them, to use them in my work. They were cones, cubes, and circles so perfect that I could never have made them myself, so I integrated them just as they were.” (ibid., p. 77) Untitled belongs to the critical, limited family of works built of these metal fixtures. These softly lustrous, delicate wires contribute a fragility and humming electricity to these works; there is poetic resonance in the idea that they continue to mediate light and energy in another way.
Standing before Untitled, the viewer is beset by a tangled barrage of cascading three-dimensional geometric forms that emerge and recede. Hundreds of fine vertical lines, painstakingly rendered by hand over a white ground, vibrate dizzyingly against jagged white horizontal marks and the imposing snarl of wire. As one’s eyes dart across the surface in an attempt to make sense of it, light and shadow continually transform it; in the course of a glance, it dematerializes entirely. Untitled is a repurposed object that categorically refuses objecthood. Here, Soto achieves the state of pure vibration and destabilization he sought throughout his lifetime, one in which a moment of joyful transcendence creates within the viewer a keen awareness of their own fragility and temporality. Soto embodies the spirit of his moment best expressed by Jean Clay: “Kineticism is not about ‘things that move;’ it is the awareness of the instability of the real.” (op. cit., p. 2)
Important Baroque Works by Jesús Rafael Soto in Major Institutions
