Le Rectangle bleu (The Blue Rectangle)

Blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, Jesús Rafael Soto’s Le Rectangle blue (The Blue Rectangle) is the image of energy and dynamism. The present work was created in 1964, the year the artist first travelled to New York Cit, where he saw Malevich’s celebrated White Square on White Background, 1918, at the Museum of Modern Art. Inspired by the Russian artist’s optical interplay, Soto’s ensuing works furthered this kinetic abstraction. In Le Rectangle blue, strings emerge from a central blue slab to cover two flanking steel rectangles. The cords are irregularly placed, oscillating forms through which a visual rhythm is kindled. Belonging to a generation of Latino artists who burst onto the Parisian art scene in the 1950s, Soto moved to France after training at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, Venezuela. Drawn into the orbit of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a hub of avant-garde thought and activity, he worked alongside an international group of artists that included Jean Tinguely and Julio Le Parc. His paintings of this period explored the perceptual questions first proposed in the images of Piet Mondrian, and later exploited in the optical, phantasmagoria of Victor Vasarely. In these Soto hoped to push abstraction beyond mere illusion. Considering the works of this period, critic Guy Brett said, ‘Soto's achievement has been to give a luminous imaginative force to the idea of continuum. Forms are not localizable, it's not possible to say: there are the forms and this is the space that contains them. Forms and space are continually creating each other, changing into each other’. Indeed, the sensation of a permanent flux entirely captures the continuum of Soto’s art, caught between stasis and movement, transforming colour, space and line into pure perception. As Bret went on to conclude, ‘It has always been part of the poetry of Soto's work to be half in the world and half out of it. The rods oscillate between the abstract world of relations and the world of things. Unpredictable currents from the world of things activate and bring to life the painting's space’ (G. Brett, Soto: October-November 1969, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1969, p. 15-16).