Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005)

Obelisk Gallery, Boston
Private Collection, New York
Sale: Christie's East, New York, Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, May 17, 1995, lot 50 illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. The media layer is tightly bound and stable. Minor scuff marks are present on the outer wooden box/frame. The metal bar is slightly loose but is securely attached.
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"In the beginning [of the abstract art movement] there was Mondrian. When Mondrian died modern art found itself back in a great desert of possibilities. That is the story of Soto.” [1]

The Venezuelan-born Jesús Rafael Soto is one of the founding fathers of Kinetic art. Leaving for Paris in 1950 at the age of 27 to further his artistic career, Soto permanently entrenched himself in this artistic capital. Together with Pol Bury and Jean Tinguely, he began showcasing his investigations of vibrational movement. By the mid-1950s, each pushed the possibilities of kinetic theory. Inspired by the works of Kazimir Malevich (White on White, 1918) and Piet Mondrian (Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43), Soto quickly identified unresolved problems in these two respective paintings. This question would become the central focus and inspiration of his entire artistic production: what is an object’s position in time and space. Soto’s ultimate solution was and still is the brilliant and essential coup of Kinetic art. By using squares—which he considers “the most genuine human form”, superimposed upon a careful landscape of sequential lines, Soto achieves a revolutionary Soto achieves a revolutionary optical illusion of a vibrational and moving state. 

Although seemingly simplistic, Untitled (Le Carré Rouge), represents one of Soto’s most ambitious and intimate uses of the square. Drawing upon the proposals of both Malevich and Mondrian's on the relationship between energy, matter, space and time, Soto advances beyond the bare geometry and the single-dimensions of his predecessors. Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, proposes a rhythmic movement by the interjection of horizontal and vertical yellow lines and a relentless patterning of red, gray and blue squares. Mondrian’s squares however, recess and reappear in front of the viewer’s eye in perfect synchronized and peaceful harmony. Soto uses this painting as his invitation to reintroduce us, the viewers, to the realities of space and movement in a new format.

Soto’s masterful, optical trick and solution becomes clear in Untitled (Le Carré Rouge): multiple, new planes of vision and third-dimensions are newly invented by the eye of the viewer. The small red square, painted at the end of a black bar, appears to be boldly suspended on its own against the endlessly vibrating movement of the black and white lines in the background. When we, the viewers, move we create new realities for Soto’s red square and we are reminded of the main pillar of the Kinetic art: endless possibilities, realities and movement.

 

[1] Jean Clay, “Soto”, SIGNALS, London, November-December,1965, p. 6