Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Esfera roja [Red Sphere]

Image caption
JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO

Esfera roja [Red Sphere]

  • 1992
  • Steel, nylon and aluminium
  • 400 x 300 x 300 cm
  • Cat. E_94
  • Comissioned from the artist in 1992
  • Observations: Sphere diameter 300 cm.
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Red Sphere (1992) is a huge piece by Jesús Rafael Soto that forms part of a long cycle of ‘multidimensional’ spheres produced using filaments hanging from the ceiling; in this case, it hangs nearly twelve metres off the floor. His popular Caracas Sphere (1974), placed on the Francisco Fajardo motorway in Venezuelan capital, is worthy of special mention. Japan Sphere (1988), which he produced to coincide with the Seoul Olympic Games, has a more symbolic tenor: it is an exception in his work in that it features a specific reference in the form of the country’s flag. The Spheres, like other works of his such as the Penetrables, intervene in the space in which they are placed and demand the participation of the visitors that move around them, who have to resolve the specific links between the work, the surrounding space and their own physicality in relation to both.

Viewers move around Red Sphere, following its circular form (the globe is in reality constructed virtually using colour) and causing it to vibrate perceptibly; at the same time viewers see another possible user, located on the other side of the enormous work, emerge or disappear depending on the movements of both of them. Understanding of the volume of the sphere in fact revolves around that transit. It is something of a paradox that a piece that lacks traction generates so much displacement. In that regard, the artist connected his work directly with the ideas of movement and time. In other words it is a work that requires the presence of a user to be activated: ‘Kinetics is a very poorly used word. What unites us is movement. The idea of movement. The idea of time. The idea of space-time with its characteristic elements, including vibration, light and the transformation of a solid element into a very fluid one’.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Jesús Rafael Soto
Ciudad Bolívar 1923 - Paris 2005

Jesús Rafael Soto studied Fine Arts at the School of Art in Caracas between 1942 and 1947. During his student days, he embarked on his professional career with a post-impressionist painting exhibition at the Official Art Salon in Caracas, but the works shown there were far removed from the style of his later oeuvre. When he completed his studies, he was appointed director of the Maracaibo Fine Arts School. In 1950 he moved to Paris, encouraged by some of his fellow students who already lived there; and he remained there from then on. In the French capital, he began to search for his own style with the intention of turning away from figurative art, although his intention was not to ‘stop being a painter’.

Soto is one of the most outstanding proponents of op art and international kinetic art. He focused on movement; his works envelop and include viewers, giving them an active, decisive role in the final outcome of his output: the work does not exist without a viewer. Soto produced pieces activated by the movement of visitors, generating a kinetic illusion by means of overlapping sections or strokes produced with wires that dance on striped backgrounds. In this, he showed his goal of stripping matter down to its essence: energy. His Penetrables are installations in which his knowledge of and concern about matter are summarised, embodied and condensed. Viewers can enter them and become part of the piece. In his own words, ‘It is the revelation (the Penetrable) of responsive space, eternally filled by the purest structural values, such as energy, time and movement’. In short; a reality reduced to a basic structure.

Major exhibitions by Jesús Rafael Soto included shows at the Free Art Workshop (Caracas, 1949); the Aujourd’hui Gakeru, Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels, 1957); the Caracas Fine Art Museum (1957, 1959, 1964, 1967, 1971 and 1992); the Iris Clert Gallery (Paris, 1959); the Müller Gallery (Stuttgart, Germany, 1964); the Kunsthalle Bern (Berne, 1968); the Akron Art Center (Ohio, United States, 1971); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1974); the Simón Bolívar University (Caracas, 1980); The Hokin Gallery (Miami, United States, 1985); the Theo Gallery (Madrid and Barcelona, 1990); the Maracay Mario Abreu Contemporary Art Museum (Maracay, Venezuela, 1993); the Seomi Gallery (Seoul, 1994); the Telefónica Art Exhibition Hall (Santiago de Chile, 1999); the Metropolitan Cultural Centre (Quito, 2003); the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (Curitiba, Brazil, 2005); the NYU Grey Art Gallery (New York, 2012); the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1979 and 2013) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2019). He won the National Painting Award in Venezuela in 1960. In 1973 the Jesús Soto Foundation Modern Art Museum was opened in Ciudad Bolívar (Venezuela).

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.