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Born in1923 in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela

Dead in 2005

BIOGRAPHY

Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Caracas, Soto moved to France in 1950. His ambition is to move the notion of artwork by introducing disturbing elements such as movement but maintaining the frontal relationship with the viewer . It removes everything related to expression, feeling and the irrational.

 

His plastic volumes are designed to transform the eyes of man, enrich his experience by confronting him with a new space, new colors. But undeniably, it is the introduction of the movement, and no longer its suggestion, which becomes the prime mover of his artistic adventure.

 

He works very quickly transparency by integrating a Plexiglas surface superimposed on the painting and on which a drawing (spirals, dotted lines, squares, squares etc.) generates a certain vibration of the work. The renunciation of the motor to create the movement is the proof that he wishes to privilege painting above all else. The movement is the essence of the work: in front of it, the spectator has the leisure to choose his point of view and while moving, he can vary to infinity his visual experience.

 

The creation of Soto is delivered from any previous quotation and recommends only the purest geometry. He abandons the surface of the canvas as a unique place of artistic expression by introducing non-specific materials such as plexiglass and steel. He multiplies the axes of researches. The square is very present in his work and is from the beginning the basis of his artistic lexicon.

 

By suspending horizontally metal rods that oscillate freely in front of the table, he reaches a degree less and less controllable and approaches the approach of Alexander Calder. Except that the work is limited to the space between the stems and the painting, between sculpture and painting. The playful and spontaneous graphics of Soto go even further with the Péntrables, with which the participation of the spectator reaches its paroxysm. His work materializes the abolition of the distance between the body and the work and the ambition to go ever further in the construction of air volumes and almost impalpable.

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