Soto Seminar: A New Collaboration between MASP and ISLAA

The Soto Seminar proposes to reflect, from new perspectives, on the work of Venezuelan artist Jesús Soto (1923–2005), a leading figure in kinetic art and Latin American modernism. By dissolving rigid boundaries between spectator and artwork and incorporating movement as a determining factor in artistic experience, Soto contributed decisively to theoretical debates that remain urgent today, such as notions of immateriality, interaction, and virtuality.

Specialists in his oeuvre will present papers on the conceptual principles that guided his practice, from the artistic and political contexts of Venezuela to his trajectory in Paris from the 1950s onward. By tracing constellations of references and projecting his interests into the future—such as music and the interplay between matter and energy—the seminar seeks to highlight the relevance and reach of Soto’s work beyond Latin American borders, underscoring the emergence of alternative discursive centers in the global field. 

The event, held in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, is part of the preparatory activities for the exhibition dedicated to Soto that will take place in 2026 at MASP.

ORGANIZED BY

Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP, and Mateus Nunes, Assistant Curator, MASP

The Soto Seminar is presented by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA, New York), and with the support of Atelier Soto. 


COORDINATION
Glaucea Helena de Britto, Assistant Curator, MASP.


LIVE STREAMING
The seminar will be broadcast live on MASP’s YouTube channel. The presentations will have simultaneous translation into Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, and Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS).

To obtain a certificate of attendance, participants must sign the attendance list, which will be available through a link provided during the seminar.

PROGRAM

November 5, 2025

10:30-10:40 a.m.
INTRODUCTION
Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP
Ariel Aisiks, Founder and President, ISLAA

10:40 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

ARNAULD PIERRE
Beyond material/immaterial: Soto’s antimateriality 

This presentation will take a fresh look at the notion of “immateriality” that permeates Soto's approach to science and art. Having become a commonplace in critical and historical reception, it tends to situate the artist's approach within an overly rigid dichotomy between the material and the immaterial. Instead, I propose to test a more precise notion, that of “antimateriality,” derived from quantum physics—a field of study dear to Soto. In this context, which is also that of the threats of the atomic age, antimatter refers less to the negation of matter than to an alternative state of it, shaped by radiation and nuclear energy. This approach also makes it possible to highlight—beyond their formal and aesthetic differences—Soto's relationship with the approaches of some of his contemporaries, such as Victor Vasarely and Yves Klein.

LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS
Jesús Soto, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica: Rotation, Nachleben and Return of the Square. Afterlives of Constructive Art in Latin America

Through a detailed analysis of an early work by Soto, his landmark Rotación (1952), this lecture will delve into various manifestations of the ‘constructive square’ in Latin America (notably Venezuela and Brazil). Soto’s Rotación functions as a metamorphic, conceptual, and antithetical deconstruction of Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), a sort of ‘modern nachleben’ of this signature constructive symbol. Almost contemporary to Soto’s Rotación, Lygia Clark’s Discovery of the Organic Line (1954) features a different field of survival for the constructive square, this time related to Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and Red Square (1915). If Soto proposed a diagrammatical reduction—a de-activation—of Malevich’s White on White, Clark presents a survival of the Black Square, its re-activation in the form of a pictorial mise en abyme, dismantling the genealogical rapport to Suprematism in favor of a topological shift, one that takes painting as place, and place as literal embodiment, ultimately accomplished as the funeral action (and resurrection) of the square by Hélio Oiticica’s last performance, To Return Earth on to Earth (1978).

Moderation: Mateus Nunes, Assistant Curator, MASP


12:30—1:30 p.m.
Break


2:00—3:30 p.m.
SEAN NESSELRODE MONCADA
Flux Matter: Soto's Vibrations

Soto’s 1957 work Première Vibration announces a decisive shift. Exchanging planar Plexiglas constructions for a less tidy, more materialized projection of found objects, it inaugurates the artist’s longstanding interest in vibration as a physical and metaphysical process. This lecture contemplates vibration as the key operation animating Soto’s oeuvre, an oscillatory motion that not only forms the conduit between matter and energy, but also grounds his work in the immediate extractive and atomic milieu of postwar modernity. As exercises in dematerialization and the perceptual production of a hybrid “energy-matter,” Soto’s Vibrations offer key insights into largely unacknowledged presumptions of energy distribution, the flow of capital, and the ontology of the material world that undergird our understanding of what it means to be modern.


JUAN LEDEZMA
Soto’s “Idea of a Country”

Jesús Soto recognized in Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s partitions of perforated concrete a means for “the destruction of the wall” and for rendering architecture “abstract.” Soto’s abstract work, conversely, became architectural through the obliterative transformation of the plane into discrete vibratory episodes, eventually spatialized in the environmental works called Penetrables. What in both cases bridged architecture and abstraction was the use of open structures that prompted the serialized layering of perceptions, so that the building or the work would register as repetitively changing constructions. This perceptual mode of constructive agency can be revealingly mapped onto notions of social action mobilized by the discourse that gained political prominence in Venezuela beginning in the 1960s. Articulating the fixity of a constructed order into the random event of its alteration, kinetic forms paralleled and even reconfigured this discourse’s exploration of ways of reconciling structural integrity with creative transformation. Their constructive logic itself offered a symbolic, if not allegorical, conduit for positing and working through what Soto called “the idea of a country.”

Moderation: Isabela Ferreira Loures, Curatorial Assistant, MASP


3:30—4:30 p.m.
PAOLA SANTOS COY
Spatial Scores

This lecture explores the relationship between Jesús Rafael Soto's work and music, situating it in an expanded terrain where vibration operates as an aesthetic category that articulates sound, matter, and perception. Since his early connections with serialism in Europe, Soto applied musical principles to the visual realm to establish his own methodology, which later led to spatial and bodily experiences such as vibrations and sonorous penetrables. Access to archival materials today opens the possibility of reading his production as a visual writing close to musical notation. The presentation proposes viewing Soto's practice as a sensitive transcription between disciplines, in which music ceases to be a mere referent and becomes an organizing principle of the aesthetic experience in space.


ESTRELLITA B. BRODSKY
Displacement as an Aesthetic Strategy: Jesús Soto in Paris, 1950–1970

This lecture examines the Paris years of Venezuelan Kinetic artist Jesús Soto, focusing on displacement as both an aesthetic principle and a critical strategy. Leaving Venezuela in 1950 amid political upheaval, Soto entered a dynamic Parisian scene where Latin American and European avant-gardes converged. Through networks such as Los Disidentes, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Art d’Aujourd’hui, and Galerie Denise René, he redefined abstraction around ideas of dematerialization and instability, destabilizing the art object and engaging the viewer as participant. Soto’s practice not only transformed European modernism but also articulated a distinctly Latin American vision of art as socially engaged and participatory, forging a new kinetic language rooted in displacement and exchange.

Moderation: Agustín Diez Fischer, Senior Manager of Research and Archives, ISLAA

4:30–5:30 p.m.
Break


5:30–6:30 p.m.
ARIEL JIMÉNEZ
Jesús Soto: Immaterials

This lecture aims to describe Jesús Soto's artistic processes between 1949 and 1962, in his desire to give visible form to one of the major concerns of modern times: the energy and immaterial forces that, in his view, govern the universe.

Moderation: Fernando Oliva, Curator, MASP