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拍品專文
"I wondered what would happen if I could put myself inside the vibration" - Jesús Rafael Soto
Soto belongs to the generation of young Latin American artists that burst upon the Paris scene in the 1950s, channeling concrete geometries into the radical innovations of Kineticism and Op art. After training at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, he moved to Paris in 1950 and was soon drawn into the orbit of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Galerie Denise René, the cradle of postwar geometric abstraction. Working alongside an international group of artists that included Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, and Julio Le Parc, Soto explored perceptual problems first proposed in the work of Piet Mondrian and later radicalized by the optical experiments of Victor Vasarely, searching for the means of pushing abstraction beyond mere illusionism. By the mid-1960s, he began to create increasingly immersive and participatory works—among them Bleu et noir, penetrable suspendu—that suggestively dematerialize color and line into pure, phenomenological experience.
The present work belongs to the series of Volumes suspendus that Soto initiated, alongside the large-scale Penetrables, in 1967. “I always wanted to get inside them,” Soto reflected of his first kinetic structures. “I started wondering what would happen if I put myself inside that vibration. If I started to superimpose the rods on several levels, like I did with Plexiglas twenty years earlier, maybe I could capture new values. . . . Then in 1966 and 1967 the idea of the Penetrable progressively emerged, by multiplying those rods until they covered the whole space and became an autonomous work.” The Volumes suspendus originated in the models shown at Denise René in May-June 1967, now held in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto (Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela), and in the ephemeral work commissioned by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva for Venezuela’s Pavilion at Expo 67, the World’s Fair in Montreal. “It was small, but people could go in and they had a lot of fun; they played inside,” Soto explained of the installation at Denise René. “When you entered, since they were metal rods, they produced a sound like this (Soto lowers his head and makes a gesture with his hands, trying to describe an enveloping sound, like that of rain)” (Jesús Soto in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, New York, 2011, pp. 85-6).
Bleu et noir, penetrable suspendu may be the first work of this type that Soto created outside of a specific commission. Like the related Volume suspendu (1968; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne), Bleu et noir, penetrable suspendu is larger in size than the earlier prototypes but not scaled to the architecture of a specific room or installation. As a discrete object, it exists as both a shimmering, optical (and auditory) vibration and a cruciform volume floating in space. Its shape harks back to Kazimir Malevich’s iconoclastic Black Cross (1915) and is repeated in Soto’s first Penetrable (1967). The progressive fade from blue to black is distinctive—typically, Soto’s transitions between colors are more abrupt—and amplifies the overall perceptual effect: the colors oscillate materially and optically, immersing the viewer in an extraordinary chromatic experience.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Soto belongs to the generation of young Latin American artists that burst upon the Paris scene in the 1950s, channeling concrete geometries into the radical innovations of Kineticism and Op art. After training at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, he moved to Paris in 1950 and was soon drawn into the orbit of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Galerie Denise René, the cradle of postwar geometric abstraction. Working alongside an international group of artists that included Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, and Julio Le Parc, Soto explored perceptual problems first proposed in the work of Piet Mondrian and later radicalized by the optical experiments of Victor Vasarely, searching for the means of pushing abstraction beyond mere illusionism. By the mid-1960s, he began to create increasingly immersive and participatory works—among them Bleu et noir, penetrable suspendu—that suggestively dematerialize color and line into pure, phenomenological experience.
The present work belongs to the series of Volumes suspendus that Soto initiated, alongside the large-scale Penetrables, in 1967. “I always wanted to get inside them,” Soto reflected of his first kinetic structures. “I started wondering what would happen if I put myself inside that vibration. If I started to superimpose the rods on several levels, like I did with Plexiglas twenty years earlier, maybe I could capture new values. . . . Then in 1966 and 1967 the idea of the Penetrable progressively emerged, by multiplying those rods until they covered the whole space and became an autonomous work.” The Volumes suspendus originated in the models shown at Denise René in May-June 1967, now held in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto (Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela), and in the ephemeral work commissioned by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva for Venezuela’s Pavilion at Expo 67, the World’s Fair in Montreal. “It was small, but people could go in and they had a lot of fun; they played inside,” Soto explained of the installation at Denise René. “When you entered, since they were metal rods, they produced a sound like this (Soto lowers his head and makes a gesture with his hands, trying to describe an enveloping sound, like that of rain)” (Jesús Soto in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, New York, 2011, pp. 85-6).
Bleu et noir, penetrable suspendu may be the first work of this type that Soto created outside of a specific commission. Like the related Volume suspendu (1968; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne), Bleu et noir, penetrable suspendu is larger in size than the earlier prototypes but not scaled to the architecture of a specific room or installation. As a discrete object, it exists as both a shimmering, optical (and auditory) vibration and a cruciform volume floating in space. Its shape harks back to Kazimir Malevich’s iconoclastic Black Cross (1915) and is repeated in Soto’s first Penetrable (1967). The progressive fade from blue to black is distinctive—typically, Soto’s transitions between colors are more abrupt—and amplifies the overall perceptual effect: the colors oscillate materially and optically, immersing the viewer in an extraordinary chromatic experience.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park