JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO

On view beginning February 7, 2023, the exhibition gathers historical works by one of last century’s most influential figures in Latin American and European art. Tatiana Cuevas and Paola Santos Coy summarised their curatorial point of departure:

‘It has been a privilege to return to Soto’s work on the centenary of his birth. In collaboration with the Atelier Soto in Paris, we brought together a selection that synthesises the central ideas explored in the exhibition presented at the Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo almost twenty years ago. The Instability of the Real now displays a succinct exploration through Soto’s research towards expanding the experience of the bi-dimensional surface of painting into the three-dimensional space. It includes early works such as Untitled (1958), Vibration blanche (1959), L’aiguille (1961), in which he established the keys to activate the first optical relations between the elements and materials used in his works. The exhibition also includes a selection from his series Escrituras and Ambivalencias, through which he developed systems of interactions between form, space and time. Thanks to the intense work that the Atelier Soto has undertaken during the past decade to recuperate and restore vintage works, we were able to integrate Torre vibrante blanco y negro (1968), as well as Pénétrable (1992) presented at Soto’s retrospective exhibition organized by Serralves Foundation in Portugal, in 1993. The exhibition is an homage to Soto, presenting an integral experience of his practice in a perhaps more intimate space that looks to emulate the way his works cohabited in some of his early solo exhibitions during the sixties and seventies.”

Soto’s practice transcended the static concepts of form and volume by formulating serial relationships between the elements that made up his work. He gradually integrated instability, vibration, and dematerialisation processes in order to transfer the pictorial plane into the three-dimensional space. Soto’s pioneering perceptual experience of the artistic object, in which the spectator’s participation is essential, began in the fifties and traced a path towards the broader experimental turn. Faced with a world in constant movement, as the critic Jean Clay made clear, Kineticism is not about ‘things that move’; it is the awareness of the instability of the real. (‘La Peinture est finie’ Painting is finished, Robho, No.1, 1967). In our current nonstop-changing world, Soto’s postulates reclaim a conscious evaluation of the tremendous speed with which we inhabit and perceive time and space.

About the oncoming exhibition, Galería RGR founder Ricardo González comments: ‘We’re honoured to organise such an important project we’ve been working on for over a year along the Estate of Jesus Rafael Soto in Paris. It is a privilege to have his early seminal works, a Pénétrable installation, and a very representative set of works belonging to Soto’s different series and periods. Having Tatiana Cuevas and Paola Santos Coy as curators, whose expertise and experience with Soto’s work have been of crucial importance in the selection of the pieces, and the exhibition’s focus, allowed us to create a complete narrative on the outstanding achievements of Soto’s career with a fresh view.’

The exhibition brings together a selection of historical works, it will present a compendium of Soto’s key explorations towards a novel aesthetic terrain that incorporates the inherent ambiguity of time and space.

About Jesús Rafael Soto

Jesús Rafael Soto (Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela 1923 – Paris 2005) was an influential and central figure of post-war global modernism. He studied at the Caracas School of Fine Arts and later relocated to Paris in 1950, where he became a part of the international group of artists that sought to renew the experimental art scene in the postwar. During his career, he developed a crucial role in redefining an artwork’s reach and social function, starting from investigating the space-time unit of an object. Soto is commonly associated with Op art and participatory art. His work is characterised by the continuous study of movement and the dematerialisation of form, producing Kinetic constructions in which the spectator’s active role is vital. Soto was recognised with several honours, among them the National Plastic Arts Award of Venezuela in 1984, and the National Prize of Sculpture awarded in France in 1995.

Selected solo shows include: Taller Libre de Arte, Caracas (1949); Galerie Denise René, Paris, (1956 and 1967); Kunsthalle of Bern and at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam (1968); Musée de la Ville de Paris (1969); Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (MBA, 1957, 1971 and 1993); Signals Gallery, London (1965); Galería Estudio Actual, Caracas (1969); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1969); Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (1972); Salomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (1974); Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1979); Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid (1982); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (MACC, 1983); Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris (1997); Centro Cultural Conde Duque, in Madrid (1998) and Visión en Movimiento, a major traveling retrospective that was presented at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico, at the Fundación PROA in Argentina and at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, Italy (2005- 2007). In 2019 the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao held a retrospective of his work.

Galería RGR