Jesus Rafael Soto
«Waiting»
Born in Venezuela in 1923, Jesús Rafael Soto received his training at the School of Fine Arts in Caracas and settled in Paris in 1950, where he would live until his death in 2005. In 1955, Soto participated in the exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René, which officially launched kinetic art. During the same decade, he began to create linear and kinetic constructions using industrial and synthetic materials such as nylon, Perspex, steel, and industrial paint.
Major exhibitions on Soto’s work have taken place at the Signals Gallery in London (1965); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1971); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1974); and the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1979). For each of these exhibitions, Soto used nylon thread or plastic rope to transform the exhibition space into an immersive kinetic installation, in which the viewer’s experience within the constructed environment was at the heart of the work’s meaning. Soto’s sculptures and environments often play with the juxtaposition of solid and void, deliberately disrupting perception by blurring the distinction between reality and illusion..
