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n an extraordinary display of daring composition, Escritura d’Arras is one of the earliest and most elegant examples from Jesús Rafael Soto’s lauded series Escrituras to ever appear at auction. Executed in Paris in 1963 by the Venezuelan pioneer of geometric and kinetic abstraction, this striking construction captures universal values of language and meaning by abstracting them entirely. Soto’s commitment to dynamism and the spectator’s active engagement with his art comes to play in Escrituras d’Arras as he invites us into his imaginative world that is not limited by two dimensions. Through the décollage or detachment process, Soto’s Escrituras invade the viewer’s space, and redefines language from representational to experiential.

Écriture d’Arras stands as testament not only to Soto’s extraordinary contribution to twentieth-century art, but also to Harry Abrams’ visionary collecting. Executed by the artist for the Venezuelan pavilion at the 32nd Biennale di Venezia and exhibited there for the first time, it was acquired there by Abrams. This first acquisition marked a lengthy and fruitful relationship between artist and publisher and Soto’s work was included in several publications.
In Soto’s works, the visual and tangible elements of Mondrian’s paintings were physically materialized by means of structural elements which made space visible, tangible, mobile, active, and at the same time, immaterial or incorporeal. Soto had to construct an artistic vocabulary which permitted him to articulate that which others had not envisioned, to enter into the life of space itself by means of new expressive materials. Departing from the mechanical mobility of Moholy-Nagy, who rotated his form by electrical means, from Calder, who discovered how a slight breeze could be converted into art and how a puff of air could become color, harmony and delight, Soto opened up new territories which none had thought to explore.

Born in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela in the early 1920s, Jesús Rafael Soto was quickly absorbed into the rapidly developing abstract movements of his period. He first arrived to Paris in 1950 on a government-sponsored scholarship, and quickly became immersed in the diverse community of Latin American and European expats who flooded the French capital in the early postwar years. Producing a series of crisp abstractions in which he sought to expound upon the innovations of artists like Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, Soto began to exhibit at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay and, critically, Victor Vasarely - who incorporated mobility into static works of art. An accomplished classical guitarist and voracious autodidact, Soto also found inspiration in music and physics - modalities that allowed him to explore the codification of nature and the infinite possibilities of individual experience that a work of art could offer to the viewer. Particularly influential were the compositions of the Baroque composer Johannes Sebastian Bach. Just as Bach painstakingly constructed byzantine melodic and harmonic lines to comprise a rational and perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art, in this series, Soto’s disciplined structure of synchronized repetition reveals a severe precision that dances along the border between order and improvisation.

From an earlier series of Plexiglas serialized constructions, Soto moved towards the more mysterious, yet deeply delicate and suggestive Escrituras. In the early 1960s, Soto had taken his goal of “drawing in space” into a completely new plane, placing bodies of undulating metal wires floating across rigid vertical rods. In Écriture d’Arras we witness Soto’s subtle return to the intuitive lines of a painter’s hand, rejecting the strict geometric forms that had characterized his earlier years. Instead, he invites the viewer to trace the remnants of his movements that have been embedded into the wires, evoking an indistinguishable yet personal message that instantly meets the eye. Piet Mondrian’s early influence on Soto is apparent in this piece; his attempt to take the Dutch artist’s paintings out of the static realm and investigate his overlapping vertical and horizontal lines as “vibrations” is further exemplified in Soto’s combination of rigid, vertical rods with the curving wires layered at the forefront of the work.

Soto’s Écriture d’Arras elegantly captures the artist's growing concern with the spectator’s physical and temporal interaction with his work, using the universal concept of writing as a tool to explore structure, space and experience.