"Le cinétisme, ce n’est pas ‘ce qui bouge,’ c’est la prise de conscience de l’instabilité du réel. (Kineticism is not about “things that move,” it is about understanding the instability of what is real.)"
The most important work by Jesús Rafael Soto ever to appear at international auction, Barroco negro marks a critical apex in Soto’s artistic and philosophical project: a transferrence of artistic agency from artist to viewer - a total restructuring of the roles of artist and audience. Here, tiny crisp white hand-rendered horizontal lines zig-zag frantically across a monumental and meticulously collaged black panel. They zip across tangles of rigid wire that leap out of the picture plane, through tiny grid-works of inset burlap, and over craggy mountains of accumulated pigment. As the viewer’s eyes move across the surface, it enters a constant state of transformation as new forms appear, advance and recede; the work creates an immersive and psychologically profound experience of complete dematerialization.
Important Baroque Works by Jesús Rafael Soto in Major Institutions
Soto first arrived in Paris in 1950 on a scholarship at age 27, and quickly became immersed in the diverse community of Latin American and European expat artists, musicians and poets who flooded the French capital in the immediate postwar years. In 1952 Soto, an accomplished classical guitarist, was introduced by his friend, the radical composer Pierre Boulez, to the dodecaphonic compositions of Arnold Schoenberg - whose concept of the serialized composition (in which a simple, independent structure takes precedence over the composer’s role in choosing composition, form, and harmony) profoundly reshaped Soto’s approach to artmaking. Applying these principles first to painting, Soto began to build the restrained, geometric pictorial vocabulary that would follow him through the rest of his career - and, critically, he began experimenting with a new notion of the relationship between artist, art object, and viewer.
Moving further along this path, by 1954 Soto abandoned easel painting entirely in favor of the chance-driven method of collage. He began to use industrial materials, constructing Plexiglas objects composed of multiple planes with varying degrees of transparency and gridlines of color, that allowed light to enter the work and play across its surface to endless vibrations. Like his Venezuelan compatriot Gego, Soto was driven to take the lessons of European Constructivism to a new level — to spark deeper, less passive engagement between spectator and work of art. Soto was captivated by artists who mastered capturing the mercurial effects of light to generate a deeper, metaphysical meaning - looking to the work of artists like Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy for inspiration. Soto sought to further develop the Bauhaus artist’s ideas around the activation of four dimensions in artmaking, drawing inspiration from works like Light-Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator) (1930). One of the earliest electrically-powered artworks, the Light-Space Modulator is a rotating metal construction that generates a startling array of visual effects when its reflective surfaces interact with directional light. As Ariel Jiménez explains in the seminal text Conversaciones con Soto, “[For Soto] light itself manifests as an ideal image of God, its purest sensible expression, [and, scientifically as] an expression of energy, the source and the beginning of everything that exists…Though he was not a religious man, both circumstances ascribe a transcendent value to light. Capturing it, somehow producing it through painting, and achieving its very real appearance in his work would be, for Soto, a visual goal and a double source of legitimacy, both metaphysical and historical.” (pp. 18-19)
Drawing on the idea of vibration he began in the Plexiglas works, Soto embarked in a radically new direction characterized by the eminent Venezuelan critic Alfredo Boulton as the “Baroque Period” (1958-62) for their application of irregular shapes to convey movement in space - echoing the use of the term by French critic Michel Ragon to denote freedom from past influences. Barroco negro belongs to this brief yet critical period, widely considered the most important of the artist’s lengthy and illustrious career. In these works, the industrial detritus of city life (twigs, construction salvage, wires cast off from lamps and cars, nails and burlap sacks) is entangled with rigorously geometric compositional structures – to dazzling and destabilizing effect. Soto characterized this small group of works as follows:
The idea was to take insignificant but strongly formal objects (old wood, wire, needles, gratings, and pipes), integrate them into the work and bring them to a state of disintegration through pure vibration. Of course it was not all easy, and it was a tremendous amount of work to dematerialize a piece of wood.
While never officially aligned with any specific group, Soto was most notably involved during these years with two distinct and formidable art movements: the Nouveaux Réalistes (New Realists) in Paris, led by his friend Yves Klein, and the Düsseldorf-based Group Zero founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. He shared with both a driving impulse to connect with viewers through an art deeply grounded in daily life - and, like them, rejected the dramatic action painting of American Abstract Expressionism, seeking to undermine the cult of individualistic artistic genius through artworks that required the activation of the viewer to exist.
In Barroco negro, Soto comes as close as he ever does to the evocation of human figures - not by representation, but by the physical index of their presence in the form of recycled materials. Like Alberto Burri, whose monochromatic Sacchi of the late 1950s utilize burlap both for its rugged, formal beauty and for its elegiac associations with World War II, Soto deftly captures multiple tensions here. On the one hand, the emotional resonance of these materials renders the work deeply human - and on the other, the geometric rigor and optical complexity of their context brings them to a metaphysical plane. The true activation of the artwork is fully dependent on the viewer, and its existence is specific to the viewer’s temporality - successfully making visible that elusive fourth dimension, space-time. In his “methodical destruction of all stable form, the molecular shattering of solids, dissolution of volumes," (ibid.) Soto offers a profoundly meaningful metaphysical experience.
