JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO | Tes No. 1

Estate of the artist
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 2005

The panel is in good condition. It displays an aged painted surface with a craquelure that is stable. Several of the nails that are part of its construction have pushed upward on the panel. The seams along the three panels are visible as the wood has aged. Minor scuffs and scratches were seen on the side of the panel. The T-shaped wires are accounted for and swivel in place. A small area of inpainting was observed on the top panel. The paint on the black panels is textured whereas the white panel in between is not. Minor paint loss was noted on the bottom right corner of the bottom black panel.(This condition report has been prepared courtesy of Wilson Conservation, LLC)
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Soto’s mature works initially grasp the viewer’s attention with their mesmerizing optical effects - colors that enter then recede from our space; vibrational textures that cause our eyes to lose focus and disorient. These visceral reactions lead us to the deeper truth that runs through Soto’s work, which art historian Ariel Jiménez reveals in his seminal text in conversation with the artist: “Much of what makes Soto’s structures interesting is derived not from the optical illusions they set in motion, but from what they suggest or attempt to make visible: the dimension, as such, of the sublime, of everything that we can conceive but can neither see nor make someone to see.” (Ariel Jiménez, Jesús Soto in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, New York, 2011, p. 34) The duality of the sublime that Soto sought his entire career to make visible, metaphysical and scientific, is on clear display in the present work, Tes No. 1 (1975). For Soto, two figures are central in the interpretation of light and the experience of the sublime: the poet Dante Alighieri and the scientist Albert Einstein. Captivated by Dante’s Inferno at the age of thirteen, the artist recounts a mounting anxiety as Dante’s encounter with an imagined anthropomorphic God approaches, an anxiety which gives way to a sense of “great relief when I discovered that God was only light (in other words, energy), and that he had neither form nor a material body.” (ibid., p. 18) This sense that light (or energy) is the beginning and end of all that exists found its physical parallel for Soto in Einstein’s 1915 theory of relativity. Einstein introduced equivalence between fugitive energy (or light) and tangible, solid mass, and rendered the previously separate concepts of space and time into the single concept of the space-time continuum. Throughout his career, Soto sought to make this fundamental physical and metaphysical truth experientially tangible for us, the viewer-participant. In Tes No. 1, his scientistic approach to artmaking (which he always referred to as research) is particularly evident.

Following his baroque explorations of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which he used recycled and worn materials to begin subtle explorations in the dematerialization of space, he returned in 1962 to the pure geometric form, seeking to create transcendent visual experiences within an increasingly ascetic plastic lexicon. Soto restricts his formal vocabulary to a small group of defined elements: squares, rectangles, straight lines– and employs it to astonishingly diverse ends over the course of the 1960s and 70s. In Tes No. 1, Soto’s restraint reaches its apex, as he creates a visual environment in which all tangible matter appears to dissolve before our eyes using a single element: the line. The emergence of the Tes series marks a critical moment in Soto’s oeuvre, as “their trembling unfolding implicates for the viewer a vision of the painting that is quite different from the contemplative effect induced by the calm swaying of the hanging bars of the preceding series.” (Jean-Paul Ameline, “Au Carrefour des avant-gardes” in Soto - Collection du Pompidou, Paris, 2013, p. 25)  

1975 was a year marked for Soto by global success and vast productivity. Following his acclaimed retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum the previous year, he was commissioned to create a series of monumental installations including Escrituras and Penetrables for the Régie Rénault in Paris, in addition to a series of monuments for the Venezuelan state and an increasingly fervent studio practice. Globally, it was a year marked by conflict, turmoil, and advances; by the changing temperature of the Cold War as the United States withdrew from war with Vietnam; by the end of dictator Francisco Franco’s rule in Spain; by the first space probe launched to explore Mars; by the discovery of fractals. Seen in context of the moment of its creation, Tes No. 1 embodies the turbulence of its time, an instability which Soto viewed as central to human existence.

In Tes No. 1, Soto makes visible the destructive and restorative power of energy. Across its surface, a single column of alternating black and white Ts vibrate frantically against a backdrop of fine black and white lines. Ascending in monumental scale before the viewer, these Ts emerge from the surface of the panel in waves that engulf those standing before it, subsuming the boundary between object and spectator. We enter into a dynamic space in which static objects become dematerialized and seemingly stable masses are transfigured into pure light and energy. Soto presents the viewer with a transformative experience of the Sublime in Tes No. 1.