ART-PRESENTATION: Jesús Rafael Soto-The Fourth Dimension
Regarded as one of the founding fathers of Kinetic art, Jesús Rafael Soto’s investigations of vibrational movement and mesmerizing optical effects utilize a disciplined formal lexicon to transcendent effect. Soto once observed, “Artistic creation is a force which should preferably be directed towards the exploration of space, of the universe, of the infinite realities which surround us, but of which we are hardly conscious”. In his ascetic geometric idiom, Soto’s paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations invite encounters with the sublime.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Archive
Jesús Rafael Soto studied at the School of Fine Arts in Caracas, where he became familiar with modern European art and discovered artists like Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, whose schematic visions of reality revolutionized his own approach. Attracted by the European avant-garde movements, in 1950 he moved to Paris, where he was welcomed on arrival into “Los Disidentes”, a group of artists from the Venezuelan diaspora who were trying to renovate the art of their homeland by encouraging the most modern practices. During his first years in Paris, Soto earned his living by playing guitar in various ensembles, and it was then that the group Los Yares was formed. His interest in musical compositional structures meanwhile inspired him to produce serial works and variations, and to develop his own color scheme. In this context, the series of lectures organized at the Atelier d’Art Abstrait played a key role in Soto’s discovery of artists like Piet Mondrian and his austere orthogonal compositions; Kazimir Malevich and his radical proposal of monochrome white on black; and László Moholy-Nagy and his theories on movement, light, and transparency, published in his essay “Vision in Motion”. Crucial too was the artist’s encounter with the motorized optical devices of Marcel Duchamp, and particularly the “Rotary Demisphere” (1925), presented at the Galerie Denise René as part of the exhibition “Le Mouvement” (1955), in which Soto also participated, and where the term Kinetic Art was coined. Over the following years, Soto was to carry out further explorations of some of the ideas raised by these precursors, taking artistic investigation onto a terrain close to scientific experimentation and the philosophy of perception. Under the concept of the “fourth dimension” Soto set about integrating time and the viewer’s movement into the artwork, and in so doing defined one of the mainstays of all kinetic art. The retrospective “Soto. The Fourth Dimension” brings together over 60 works, including several of Jesús Rafael Soto’s large-scale participatory sculptures called “Penetrables”, some of his most iconic and important contributions to the recent history of art. In addition, the show includes a large number of historic paintings and mural works, which help to understand the fundamental role Soto played in the development of Kinetic Art from the early 1950s to the end of the 1960s, and to appreciate the development of his artistic practice up to the first decade of the 21st century. The Retrospecive also presents characteristic examples from his most important series, such as “Virtual Volumes”, vertical works that suggest large geometric forms suspended in the air; “Extensions”, floor-bound pieces where a chromatic mass, sometimes opaque, and other times as light as a halo, emerge from the ground; and “Progressions” works in which aerial forms protrude from the floor or ceiling to meet in what seems like a kinetic sequence or an unbroken play of tensions. In addition to all of the pieces exhibited inside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao galleries, Soto’s spectacular “Sphère Lutétia” (1996) can be viewed in the Museum’s exterior, next to the reflecting pool, for almost the four full months of the exhibition. Over the five decades of his career, Jesús Soto played a fundamental role in the redefinition of the scope and social function of art. Breaking with the conventional separation of painting and sculpture in the 1950s, Soto’s practice evolved progressively beyond the visual realm to take on an emblematic role in the radical shift that affected the art object in the following years. From the optical explorations of his early period, Soto went on to participate in the first group of kinetic artists in Paris together with such figures as Jean Tinguely, Iacov Agam, and Victor Vasarely. He also become associated with important international groups such as Zero and the circle around the Signals gallery in London. In 1967, Soto began to develop his series of “Penetrables”, large cubic structures made of hanging plastic or metal cords, which he would continue to work on for the rest of his career. Meanwhile, he also worked on architectural and pictorial series whose participatory potential is realized without immersing the spectator into the work, but still requiring them to move or participate in some fashion. Soto continued to work on large-scale commissions for public or institutional spaces up to his death in 2005. Museums such as the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in 1967, the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York in 1974, the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid in 1982, or the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1997 have all devoted important survey exhibitions to his work. Underscoring the idea of experience in terms of temporality, intensity, and spectator participation, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to reexamine this artist’s visionary and transforming career. The idea of a “fourth dimension” evokes the merging of space and time, and of form and experience in time, and is one of the fundamental concepts that artists of the mid-20th Century inherited from the quasi-utopian spiritual period of the avant-gardes. To Soto, the artist must work in an area of shared inquiry with science and philosophy. As an aesthetic experience, “Soto. The Fourth Dimension” opens up the way to all of Soto’s abstract and dynamic works, and is supremely expressed in his iconic Penetrables . In these works, Soto foreshadows the new contextual and relational directions contemporary art will follow from the 1960s onwards. According to the artist, “In the Penetrables , the spectator traverses vertical cords or bars that fill the entire available space and make up the work. From that moment on, spectator and work are physically and inextricably entwined”. In addition to the works by Soto in the exhibition, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents an important selection of archival material that helps to contextualize the output of the France-based Venezuelan artist, whose work became increasingly celebrated in Europe over the five decades of his career. The didactic space of this exhibition presents a selection of excerpts from the documentary “Una nueva visión del arte” (A New Vision of the Art) directed by the filmmaker Ángel Hurtado, as well as a music recording of the band Los Yares, which Soto created in Paris. These didactic audiovisual materials, along with an educational text, provide context for the life and practice of Jesús Rafael Soto.
Info: Curator: Manuel Cirauqui, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra, 2, Bilbao, Duration: 18/10/19-9/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus
