Jesús Rafael Soto (June 5, 1923 – January 14, 2005) was a Venezuelan kinetic and op artist, a sculptor and a painter.

He picked up the guitar and also began recreating famous pieces of art that he found in various books, magazines and almanacs.

At 16, Soto started his serious artistic career when he began to create and paint posters for the cinemas in Ciudad Bolívar.

Nobody looked further than that..." In 1938, Soto participates in a student group affiliated to surrealism ideas and publish in the local journal some poems that scandalize the society.

"[3] The director of the school, Antonio Edmundo Monsanto, was instrumental to Soto’s career as well as other very important Venezuelan artist (Omar Carreño, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Narsico Deboug, Dora Hersen, Mateo Manaure, Luis Guevara, Pascual Navarro, Mercedes Pardo and Alejandro Otero) since he often brought inspirations from foreign countries to his students, including the latest from the avant-garde: cubism.

This image caused such impact on him because "...the color started to separate off the form" and because of the multiplicity of the viewing points that he wanted to represent.

[5] In France, Soto discovered Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian’s work, and the latter suggested the idea of ‘dynamizing the neoplasticism’.

This, joined with Soto's will to create a new sort of movement that would add to three dimensional art concluded in associations with Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, and other artists connected with the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Galerie Denise René.

[5] In the 1950s, Soto experimented with serial art: the repetition of formal elements in the plan, the depersonalization of the work and the revelation of the relativity of the vision.

The work should be an autonomous object, where "real" situations were put into play, and not a plan where a determinate vision was projected.

In his Dos cuadrados en el espacio (1953), Soto began a series retaking the approaches of Malevich, specially about adopting the square as the "only valid form".

In his Desplazamiento de un cuadro transparente (1953–54) he created a spatial effect on a plane surface that latter was developed in a tridimensional way, superimposing two or more Plexiglas sheets, transparent but painted with straight or curved drawings that changed the way they were seen as the spectator moved, inviting the participation of the public.

This work was the response to a discovery: the ambiguity of spatial perception In 1955 Soto participated in the exhibition Le Mouvement, in the Denise René gallery, in Paris.

The exhibition prompted the publication of the ‘Yellow Manifest’ about kinetic art and the visual researches involving spectators and stimulus.

As results of the optical vibratory states that Soto achieves from the superposition of plans, a new situation appears: the outbreak of the solid body, its dematerialization in our retina, phenomena that is produced for the first time in Permutación (1956).

In Estructuras cinéticas de elementos geométricos (1955-57) and Armonía transformable (1956) is added a new element that was relegated in his research: color.

In the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, starting from his basic concept of matter and space as different manifestations of energy, Soto had already structured the conceptual platform of his plastic language.

It would be wrong to see in the work that is in front of you the object of my art, it isn't there if not as a witness, sign of another thing..." All of Soto's work, from start to end, answers to the same necessity of materialize his concept of the world as an impossible reality to measure in a human scale; vision where are vital the energy and space as essential situations inside nature.

[5] By inviting the spectator to participate in the work, instead of merely looking from a distance, Soto more deeply engages the audience, and makes the experience more intriguing and stimulating.

""[5] In 1973, the Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art opened in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela with a collection of his work.

Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva designed the building for the museum and Italian op artist Getulio Alviani was called to run it.

Le Carré/Musée Bonnat, Bayonne; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France (1993); Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (1993).

"Doctor Honoris Causa en Arquitectura", Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela.

"Orden Antonio José de Sucre en su Primera Clase", Cumaná, Venezuela.

"Orden General de División Francisco Esteban Gómez (Clase Oro)", Nueva Esparta, Venezuela.