Chronochrome

Jesús Rafael Soto‘s (b. 1923, Ciudad Bolivar) Chronochrome will be held simultaneously in Paris and New York spaces of Galerie Perrotin.Organized in collaboration with the artist’s Estate and cura ted by Matthieu Poirier, the exhibition
presents some sixty works from private collection or institutions, created between 1957 and 2003. Soto‘s work continues to draw international attention: in 2013, the Centre Pompidou exhibited twenty donated key works of the artist.
He trained at art school in Caracas and moved to Paris in 1950, where he lived alternatively with Caracas for the rest of his life. His work developed gradually from his first Parisian pieces, created partly under the influence of the Neoplasticism of Piet Mondrian and the theories of Laszló Moholy-Nagy on light and transparency in his writings Vision in Motion. The title Chronochrome of this double exhibition, describes the kinetic exploration of the monochrome in Soto’s work, in which pure colour leaves the stable support of the surface in order to become a vibratory phenomenon, playing with the perception of real space and time.

The works brought together at Galerie Perrotin in Paris and New York may disconcert, disorient and seem elusive. The eye—and also the body in the case of one Penetrable—is subtly trapped, wandering endlessly in spaces that oscillate between painting and sculpture, object and image. In the way it enters our perceptual space and refuses to be fully grasped, a work by Soto is, as Henri Bergson would put it, an object that no one has seen and that no
one ever will see in its totality. Whether with a wall relief, a sculpture or an environment, this key figure of radical abstract art invites us to have an experience that is always unique, new every time: the experience of an incompleteness, a space-time continuum that can never be summed up in an image or verbal account. More than any other abstract painting, relief or sculpture from the last decades, Soto’s kinetic art escapes photography. At a time when image is all, this may beSoto‘s work’s prime quality.