Exhibition Soto

Jesús Rafael Soto. A retrospective
For its fourth temporary exhibition, Soulages museum is presenting a retrospective devoted to the great Venezuelan artist who spent most of his life in Paris and went on to become a master of kinetic art : Jesús Rafael Soto (1923 – 2005).

Visitors will have the opportunity to discover some 45 works bearing witness to the artist’s different periods: Duchamp-inspired spirals, floating squares, abstract writings, sustained vibrations, polychrome works using T-shapes, aerial cubes, virtual volumes, Cuadrados and other potentially infinite extensions of shapes. After “Dynamo” at Paris’s Grand Palais, for which he was one of the two curators, art historian Matthieu Poirier is guest curator for the exhibition. He has chosen the artist’s most radical creations according to their ability to project the spectator, simply by means of pared down vocabulary, into the elusive limbo of an intense colourful vibration.

Through works that are often spectacular on account of their scale and their powerful effect, the aim will be to appreciate the immaterial, “floating” character – both in the literal and figurative senses – of this art, of its unique in-between state, of its continual oscillation between sculptural object and sheer intangible phenomenon. The exhibition will draw on works from private collections, with the principal support of Atelier Soto, in other words the artist’s family. The Pompidou Centre – national modern art museum – has given its support by loaning works from every period, coming especially from the Soto donation.