Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, 1923 —
Paris, France, 2005

One of the precursors of kinetic art, Jesús Soto, in making time, space and movement raw materials for his artistic work, developed a work that challenges the frontier between art and scientific research, enabling a new interaction between the subject and the work of art that also consolidates a renewed relationship with the real itself.

A graduate of the School of Plastic Arts in Caracas, Soto moved to Paris in 1950, where he came into contact with Russian constructivism, neoplasticism and dodecaphonic music, decisive influences in his search for an abstraction totally devoid of any figurative and anthropocentric traces. . In this way, already in the early 1950s the artist promotes experiments involving serialization and progression of geometric shapes, the repetition of which can unfold indefinitely, which generates the sensation of movement and a consequent passage of time, as in the combination of fixed modules and Rotación furniture (1952) or Serial Painting (1952-53), in which the triangles of different dimensions are arranged in a unidirectional and potentially perpetual series. However, it is through the use of plexiglass that Soto can make time and space elements fully integrated into his work, in which dynamism is produced from the displacement of the viewer, now able to discover the inexhaustible work in its virtual variations.

The developments in the artist’s work deepen this trend towards inclusion and the indispensable participation of the viewer. Thus, in the 1960s Soto began to produce large-scale works, which explore the architectural space of the exhibitions to involve and circumscribe the visitor, ending up completely radicalizing the inclusion of the viewer in the work with the Penetrables series, which occupied the artist for four decades since 1967.

Diverse in size and quantity, Penetrables are installations that look like a shower of metal or plastic bars, suspended in the air. Although they can be observed by their external aspect, the Penetrables are completed only when lived from inside, where the viewer metamorphoses in part of the work and activates it in its spatial and sonic powers, giving life to an experience of the space and time as unity and duration, so that art becomes inexhaustible, as well as the possibilities for investigating the relationship between the body and the world.

VRP