Of all of Venezuela’s kinetic artists, Soto was perhaps the most experimental in the media and methods he utilized to expand the possibilities of art beyond a two-dimensional surface. Beginning in the 1950s through the 1960s, the artist started to regularly employ wire over canvas or layered sheets of transparent and colored plexiglass that produced the optical illusion of movement and vibration through the superimposition of line and geometric form. His interest in industrial and synthetic materials and exploration of spaces that manipulate perception later translated to sculptural, immersive works called the Penetrables— the first of which was produced in Caracas in 1968. These monumental cube-like installations, composed of flexible nylon tubes, allowed the viewer to enter and move through the work of art in such a way that directly translated Soto’s earlier exploration of movement and vibration through geometric form into real life.
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