Homenaje · 1923 Ciudad Bolívar · 2005 París
Move through the threads
When I was a kid, my dad took my brother and me to the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, Soto's hometown, and showed us his work. I've loved it ever since. Part of it is that it's genuinely cool. Part of it is that every Soto I see takes me back to that day with my family.
Soto left Venezuela for Paris in 1950 and spent his life making work that seems to move even though it stands still. The motion happens in your eyes and in your body. You don't look at a Soto so much as finish it. This page is my small attempt at the same idea, in code.
He never forgot where he came from. In 1969 he founded that museum in Ciudad Bolívar, in a building by Carlos Raúl Villanueva that opened in 1973.
Every line on screen is Soto's own, in the English of the Soto foundation's biography by Arnauld Pierre, except the line about the vibration, which is translated from the French on the Centre Pompidou page, quoting Ariel Jiménez's Conversaciones con Jesús Soto.
The music and the picture are generated in your browser as it plays.
Two minutes of Soto's work, in photographs and footage, with his own words, set to a chill house track that your browser plays live. Turn the sound up, go fullscreen, or leave it on loop on a big screen.
Soto's Penetrables are rooms full of hanging threads that you walk into. The piece only exists while someone is inside it. The yellow comes from the Gran Penetrable Amarillo at the museum in Ciudad Bolívar. Above, your cursor is the visitor. Leave it alone for a moment and three others walk through: one tall, two small.
Soto's first kinetic work, from 1955: a white spiral painted on plexiglass, floating just above a black one. He wanted the motion of Duchamp's spinning Rotoreliefs without the motor. You are the motor. Move across the panel and the spirals start to turn.
Fine stripes behind, objects hanging in front. Where they overlap, the lines start to shimmer and the solid things seem to dissolve. Move across the panel to tilt the square.
In 1968 Soto made a vibrating wall of hanging metal rods whose movement turned into sound. This one you can play. Turn the sound on and brush through the rods.
The Esfera Caracas is about 1,800 orange aluminum rods hanging along the Francisco Fajardo highway. It isn't a sphere at all, just straight rods, and it shimmers with the light and the wind. This one hangs here for you to touch. Drag to walk around it, or brush through it and the rods swing, then settle back into a sphere.
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