"Jesús Rafael Soto is one of the most original, profound, and enduring of the kineticist artists. By the time of the Venezuelan artist's arrival in Paris in 1950, the dynamics of space and form had migrated inexorably and permanently from the domain of aesthetic and scientific theory into everyday life. Motion had become the symbol-resistant zeitgeist in ways that no steam-trailing Futurist locomotive could embody or outrace.
Soto brought an existential dimension to the kinetic art that developed from the kineticism of Duchamp, Vasarely, and Calder. Soto's work infuses public or corporate spaces, which might otherwise be thought of as empty, with visual energies that conjure the flash dance of subatomic. Nonetheless, there is a reflection on human presence in Soto's art that is absent from the work of some other early Op and kinetic artists. Jean Tinguely, for example, takes us no further than a parody of spiritless industrialization and vulgar consumerism. In Soto's work, movement is always linked to presence, in most instances to the body itself. Rows of metal arcs dangling before a lined surface coalesce their actual, almost aquatic, movements with the optical kinesis generated by the observer's motion in relation to the work. When shifts in point of view create optical illusions in Soto's works, these illusions are a natural effect of the pursuit of a higher goal. This primary goal consists of forging an ambiguous sense of aesthetic space. On the one hand, there is the space defined "within" the work; on the other, the space defined by the viewer's position vis-á-vis the work. Soto's appropriation of this second manifestation of aesthetic space predates, by at least a decade, Conceptual artists' view of the context which gallery and museums provide as an inextricable element of the act of apprehending works of art."
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