Extract from the essay by Jaime Gili on Jesús Rafael Soto  

It can be said that the tradition of visual arts in Venezuela is an optical, thoroughly modern one, thanks mostly to Soto. Yet he was born far from the capital of Caracas, in Ciudad Bolívar, a colonial city by the Orinoco River that had its glory days with the rubber industry at the beginning of the 20th century. Having worked there for a few years painting posters for the local cinema “using most of the same tones of colour that I kept using until today”, Soto went to Caracas at the end of his teens in 1943, to study fine art. There he met amongst others, Alejandro Otero, who would later help him settle in Paris. Already then, they were engaged in the development of abstract painting and playing a vital role in the defence of new ways of thinking and seeing against the conservative background of Caracas, the art school itself and the media. They were working for the change that would eventually flourish in the 50s with the economic and cultural boom, but even then Caracas was not enough for them, and after a short period in Maracaibo, Soto went to Paris, following the same migrating tradition of many artists of his time.

Once in Paris Soto knew very soon that he had to start working “from where Mondrian´s work had stopped”. Born into a family of musicians and a keen musician himself, Soto discovered serial music and experimented how to translate it into painting through Moholy Nagy. His research, “making only the necessary paintings” led him to work with overlapping sheets of transparent acrylic, gradually introducing real space between the planes. Colour was entering those works, pure and freely, and also "real" movement folllowing his earlier grid-like works - a movement then always dependant on that of the viewer.

That period came to an end when the use of perspex had become almost more important than the idea he wanted to express. What followed has been called his “baroque” period - a name he accepted reluctantly. Influenced by the French nouveau réalisme and his friend Jean Tinguely, he introduced his personal idea of movement onto more textured grounds, and perhaps letting go of a tendency towards mathematical precision. The beautiful Barre Blanche from 1959 is a good example of the research he was pursuing at that time.

Soto opened up space with his so-called Pénétrables, a series of works that rank amongst the more significant works of the second half of the 20th century, certainly the most influential in Venezuela, and undoubtedly my earliest memory of experiencing contemporary art. The largest of those works take over vast spaces and visually dismember the bodies entering them, or anything seen through the beams or threads that hang from the ceilings.

Then came pure colour, floating squares, arches and vibrations - the colour appearing “randomly, just as it would in nature”. Le Petit Cube Bleu from 1962 is an important example illustrating many of these interests as well as future concerns in a subtle and playful way, as in a discovery - also Trois Vitesses from 1965 seems to explain and underline those discoveries. Other examples of Soto's exploration of colour are: the white in Vibration B of 1989, or Vibration Pistache from 2000; the blue and red in Grupo con Rojo (1987), in Un rouge et argent (1965) or Verticale rouge et blanche (1968),  and the yellows in the beautiful edition of Maquette for Sphere Theospacio from 1989 or Grand Carre Cadmio (1984).