In the decade of the 1950s in Paris, Jesús Soto embarked on an investigation of the dynamism of the painted grid through music, modern physics, and mathematics. His quest to structure the pictorial plane led him to experiment with repetition and progression, vibratory states, light, time, and movement. Soto’s work soon incorporated lined pictorial planes or plots in front of which he positioned suspended elements—found wire, metal rods, wood, needles—as a means to dematerialize these objects through the gradual movement of the viewer. Escritura Hurtado, originally titled Escritura en gris obscuro, belongs to Soto’s artistic output of “writings” dating from the early 1960s which allowed the artist to draw in spaces. Vertical wood strips painted in alternating black and white, framed by two horizontal 12-inch protruding wooden ledges, serve as a backdrop to 30 nylon thread-suspended 16-gauge metal wired curves, circles, lines, and other geometric shapes. This utilization of the space in the foreground allows the artist to engage the viewer as she/he/they walk to produce an optical illusion of movement and ambiguity. This pioneering visuality in which elements dissolve and vibratory luminous fragments dematerialize and rematerialize in new configurations challenging the viewer’s perception, helped the artist to achieve a fourth dimension of time-space. Friends with Ángel Hurtado, an artist member of the collective El techo de la ballena, filmmaker and acting director of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Soto renamed the work Escritura Hurtado in his honor.
Jesús Rafael Soto was born in Ciudad Bolívar in southeastern Venezuela. With an interest in art since childhood, Soto worked as a painter of movie signs in his teenage years. After receiving a scholarship, he moved to Caracas in 1942 to attend Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas de Caracas where he was introduced to the art of Braque, Cézanne, and intellectual pictorial problems of the fourth dimension of space-time. Studying under Rafael Ramón González, Marcos Castillo, and Juan Vicente Fabbiani, he became interested in formal synthesis and color. Upon graduation in 1947, Soto became Director of Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Maracaibo. He moved to Paris in 1950 and reunited with a group of artists and founders of Los Disidentes among them Luis Guevara Moreno, Alejandro Otero, Mateo Manaure, Pascual Navarro, Carlos González Borgen, and Narciso Debourg. He soon became interested in the work of Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, and Lázsló Moholy-Nagy and the evolution towards abstraction formulating concepts of kineticism and kinetic environments. Making a living as a guitarist, Soto soon joined the group of artists of the Salon de Réalités Nouvelles and the Galerie Denise René where he participated in the 1955 exhibition Le movement, which marked the beginnings of kinetic art. Although not the focus of a solo show, Soto’s artworks were shown at the Organization of American States in the various exhibitions throughout the 1960s, among them Twenty South American Artists from the Second Bienal Americana de Arte in June 1965 and Venezuelan Painting Today of October 1966.
