Jesús Rafael Soto was began his artistic studies in 1942 at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas, moving to Caracas during the early phases of the city’s modernization. After graduating, he served as the director of the School of Plastic Arts in Maracaibo before relocating to Paris in 1950 and becoming part of the sizeable contingent of Latin American artists in the French capital. His contemporaries included members of the Madí Group (Carmelo Arden Quin would show his work in the 1951 exhibition Espace Lumière at Galerie Suzanne Michel), Los Disidentes (Venezuelan expats), Brazilian Concrete artists, and European luminaries who exhibited alongside these South American artists at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. In 1955 he participated in what has come to be known as the exhibition that launched kinetic art, Le Mouvement, at Galerie Denise René.

In Paris, Soto questioned the tradition of geometric abstraction inherited from Piet Mondrian on the grounds that it did not break sufficiently with representation. In order to move “beyond Mondrian,” he brought painting into the realm of lived space and time by working in layers, at first by painting on and combining transparencies, then later working with wire, wood, and other materials placed in front of an alternating linear background. As viewers move in front of these patterned layers, they experience electrifying optical sensations, as foreground and background move in a pulsing interplay. Unlike traditional painting, there are a multiplicity of vantage points for these works, and they exist in a state of constant change relative to the viewer’s position. Aesthetic creation becomes the work of the spectator, and no longer of an individual artist.

Early in 1950s Paris, Soto created a painting that Luis Pérez-Oramas describes as an early magnum opus, and that critic Ariel Jiménez understands as anticipatory of his later production due to the “presence of a fixed element and and a mobile one.” This piece, Rotación (1952), features a sequence of white squares extending from left to right across the picture plane; one edge of each square is marked by a black line that changes its position from square to square in a rhythmic “flipping” sequence. As viewers make their way further down the painting, they will notice that Soto gradually becomes more abstract and reductive, eventually taking away the white square and leaving only the lines, or replacing the lines themselves with two dots. The last sequence of lines are merely dots, which Soto explains “represent all of those dots as if they were in orthogonal projection.” Soto would revisit this seminal early work in a 1967 collection of art objects entitled “Sotomagie.” Issued by Galerie Denise René, the structural play of Rotación is reproduced as a printed edition.

It is also during this time that Soto embraced Arnold Schoenberg’s method of musical composition known as the twelve-tone technique. As this technique prioritizes the relationship among different tones over the emotive qualities of the notes themselves, it provided a model of abstraction for Soto that is based on structures and systems, independent of the artist’s own subjective tendencies.