Raphael Jesus Soto Biography
Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005) was born in 1923 in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. He studied at the Escuela de artes plásticas in Caracas from 1942 to 1947 and then was director of the Escuela de bellas artes in Maracaibo, Venezuela, until 1950, when he moved to Paris. Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, as well as artists linked to the Galerie Denise René and the Nouveau Réalistes (New Realists), worked with him. Born as an illusionist painter, Soto participated in the 1955 exhibition Le mouvement (The Movement) at the Galerie Denise René, which officially launched kinetic art. For many years after this period, Soto's painting oscillated between geometric and organic forms. His work is often linked to Venezuelan Op art due to the similarities between his serial geometric paintings of the 1950s and the works of the later movement. Soto began moving in a more gestural direction in 1957, but finally returned to a geometric language in 1965. He began creating linear, kinetic structures during the same decade employing synthetic and industrial materials including steel, nylon, Perspex, and paint industrial.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1971), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1974), and the Musée national d'art moderni, Center Georges Pompidou in Paris (1979) have hosted significant exhibitions of Soto's work. In each of these exhibitions, Soto used undulating nylon or plastic ropes to transform the gallery into a sprawling, fluid installation in which the viewer's interaction with the invented environment is at the heart of the work's meaning.
Two murals by Soto were commissioned by UNESCO in 1969 for their Paris buildings. In his hometown of Ciudad Bolvar, the Museo de Arte Moderno Jess Soto officially opened in 1973, including pieces by Soto and pieces by other avant-garde painters from around the world, such as Jean Arp, Kazimir Malevich, and Man Ray. He died in Paris in 2005.
