Kinetica Artfair

Jesus Raphael Soto

Jesus Rafael Soto : 1923-2005

Jesus Rafael Soto was a Venezuelan op and kinetic artist. He received  his artistic training in Caracas and directed the Escuela de Artes  Plasticas in Maracaibo from 1947 to 1950, when he left for Paris and  began associating with Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely and  other artists connected with the Salon des Realit豠Nouvelles and the  Galerie Denise Ren笊
In the future as in the past, my art will remain linked to the  uncertain, taking care not to try to express the permanent, the  unchangeable. For I have never sought to show reality caught at one  precise moment, but, on the contrary, to reveal universal change, of  which temporality and infinitude are the constituent values. The  universe, I believe, is uncertain and unsettled. The same must be  true of my work.  Soto

Soto created penetrables, interactive sculptures which consist of  square arrays of thin, dangling tubes through which observers can  walk around. It has been said of Soto’s art that it is inseparable  from the viewer; it can only stand completed in the illusion  perceived by the mind as a result of observing the piece.

The function of any work of art is to stimulate reflection; its  interest is highly conceptual, although the artist must resort to  sensorial means to make his concepts clear.  Soto

From 1970 until the early 1990s, Soto’s works appeared in places  such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New  York, as well as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1973, the  Jes�to Museum of Modern Art opened in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela  with a large collection of his work.

The immaterial is the sensitive reality of the universe. Art is the  sensitive knowledge of the immaterial. To be aware of the immaterial  in the state of pure structure is to cover the last stretch of the  road towards the absolute.
Soto

On loan from Private Collection

www.jr-soto.com