A large sphere of Jesús Soto, the Sphére Lutetia (1996), was installed over the pond of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from the beginning of October. Several Penetrables are arranged in several of the museum’s rooms in order for the public to cross them.
The work of Jesús Soto, the Venezuelan master of kinetics –along with Carlos Cruz Diez and Alejandro Otero- also one of the referents of Latin American art, is exhibited for the first time in this museum in an individual exhibition.
EFE agency speaks of Soto as “one of the greatest exponents of kinetic art that emerged in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.”
The exhibition “Soto. The Fourth Dimension” opened to the public on October 18th at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, northern Spain, with a retrospective of Soto’s work on display on display until February 9th 2020. It has more than 60 pieces: the interactive sculptures Penetrables, murals and paintings. “They allow us to understand Soto’s fundamental role in the evolution of kinetic art between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, allowing us to appreciate the development of his artistic practice up to the first decade of the 21st century, “, Deia newspaper quotes the exhibition curator, Manuel Cirauqui, who is also the curator of the museum.
From his Penetrables series “The White and Yellow Penetrable” (1968) is right at the center of the exhibition, with 300 kilos of nylon. “Going through this piece can produce a certain sensation of dizziness, an intensity that is perceived in practically all the works of the Venezuelan creator, and that has nothing to do with its size, but with the structures, the different planes and textures, which achieve optical effects that activate colors and shake forms,” writes Deia’s Maite Redondo.
El Pais’ Silvia Hernando writes that “Soto. The Fourth Dimension” is representative of the major series of Soto’s arts, along all the periods of his career. So there are pieces from the Virtual Volumes (geometric pieces suspended in the air), the Extensions (works that are in the ground and that if they are perceived in movement “a kind of halo, a mist” is formed) and their Progressions (they come out of the ceiling and the floor and do not join together.)
From his Penetrables series –which Soto began working on in 1967–, there is another 1971 piece in the exhibition, made of aluminum tubes of different heights. When people enter, the penetrable generates sound. “It is a vibratory sculpture, which at the same time is an instrument,” Redondo quotes the curator Cirauqui.
Indeed Jesús Soto was also a musician: a guitarist and a singer. He was born in southern Venezuela, in Ciudad Bolívar, in 1923, and died in Paris in 2005, where he lived and worked a good part of his life.
His work advanced from the first paintings to the kinetic paintings and the interacting works he left as a legacy. His work, made of geometric figures and spirals made of wires, nylon, aluminum, wood, metal plates, consists of activating the spectator, making them move – their bodies, their eyes, their senses- so that the optical effect occurs.
“These resting structures are arranged in such a way that the tension they contain develops at the very moment in which the spectator enters into relationship with the image, and even if it is through the most tenuous link, that of the eye,” Soto said about his mural paintings in an interview with Ludovico Silva for El Nacional back in 1963. By then his work had been exhibited abroad, in Europe. In 1965, the Kootz Gallery in New York presented Soto’s first solo exhibition in the United States. In 2019, by the way, Soto’s work returned to New York.
The Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao speaks of the value of Soto’s work: “Over a career spanning more than five decades, Soto played a fundamental role in the redefinition of the social scope and function of the work of art.” The presentation also says that Soto moved away from the “conventional separation” of painting and sculpture and progressed beyond the visual field “to become emblematic of the radical shift undergone by the art object in subsequent years.”
Soto’s work has been exhibited in key places around the world, in emblematic museums such as the Signals Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the New York’s Guggenheim the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Venice Biennale. UNESCO commissioned two murals for its headquarters in Paris.
Caracas holds Soto’s pieces on the subway, on the highway, at the Teresa Carreño theater. The Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art operates in his native Ciudad Bolívar
The Guggenheim Museum set up “Soto. The Fourth Dimension” together with the atelier of the artist in Paris. Soto’s work had not been exhibited in Spain for 37 years (Palacio Velázquez, Madrid, 1982). The last time it was shown in a Guggenheim museum was in New York in 1974. Curator Manuel Cirauqui told EFE that this exhibition “settles an outstanding debt owed by the Bilbao museum to this artist who, for the time being, is not part of our collection.”
In a reflection on his work, quoted on the website of his atelier in Paris, Jesús Soto spoke about the changeability of his work, the uncertainty of life itself: “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.”