(Cuidad Bolivar 1923–2005 Paris)
Untitled (Escritura), 1974, signed, dated 1974 and dedicated on the reverse, wood, wire, paint and nylon strings, 102 x 172 x 30 cm

Provenance:
Gianni Colombo Collection, Milan (gift from the artist)
European Private Collection

Gianni Colombo was one of the most important representatives of the international Kinetic art movement that developed during the Fifties and Sixties. With his work he has always sought to celebrate the physical, corporeal and tactile dimension of consciousness, operating within a dimension that is ludic, playful and full of lightness.
Those years were full of excitement and a desire for experimentation. In this context, many artists and groups of artists came into contact with each other, sharing experiences and providing reciprocal inspiration. While in 1959 Colombo founded the Gruppo T (with Anceschi, Boriani and De Vecchi), 1960 saw the birth of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (‘Visual art research group’) made up of Morellet, Le Parc, Sobrino and others. In the meantime, the Gruppo Zero was created in Dusseldorf in 1957 with Piene and Mack and, later on, Uecker. In addition to the research of the aforementioned groups, we can add the investigations of artists like Soto (who transformed flat surfaces into three-dimensional spaces and increased the possibility of interaction between the viewer and the work) or Dadamaino (who, fascinated by the concept of movement, created a series of optical-dynamic works which explore the infinite possibilities of perception).
These artists’ works fall within the international movement represented by the “Nuove Tendenze” (‘New trends’). The movement was born in Zagreb in 1961, but it had a lasting and global impact and was dedicated to visual research and the systematic analysis of perception.
Artists experimented with new kind of equilibriums to change the viewer’s sensations, surprising them by creating synaesthetic spaces and fields of interaction between the various sensory organs. Their desire was to disrupt the perceptual passivity of these environments, from galleries to museums and from homes to palaces, demonstrating how inertia defines their use.

In the present catalogue, Dorotheum is delighted to present several interesting examples of this research, works which are even more desirable thanks to their shared provenance from the collection of Gianni Colombo. Proof, if any more were needed, of the brilliance of the relationships that linked these artists and their research, which shared so much in common in spite of the geographic distances between them.

Jesús Rafael Soto was born on June 5, 1923, in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. He studied at the Escuela de artes plásticas in Caracas from 1942 to 1947 and then served as director of the Escuela de bellas artes in Maracaibo, Venezuela, until 1950, at which time he moved to Paris.
In Paris, having begun with abstract-geometrical research, he arrived at his first kinetic creations by means of a series of Op art solutions; from 1958 he began to integrate the graphic approach with curtains of wire and metal rods, experimenting with three-dimensional solutions and environments.
Contact with Colombo and with Nuove Tendenze was an important step for Soto: the group, in the words of Giovanni Anceschi, “united people of different origins and objectives. Nevertheless all the members are connected via a common denominator in the sense of the same common purpose: research around the values of a reality that is authentically perceptible. […] We want to demonstrate ambiguity within a rigorous context. This should be used as a means to force the spectator to participate. We want to push the spectator to mentally live the work, rather than to dedicate him/herself to a devotional contemplation of it.”
The interpretation of movement, but above all of space, takes on a role of absolute centrality in Soto’s artistic vision; in order for the work to exist, it must be traversed in physical as well as mental space, generated by the spectator, in a relationship of poetic complementarity. The spatial relations in his Escrituras are fluid; the wires, which have a concrete yet misleading physical presence outside of the painted background, as if forming the fictional definition of real space, become immaterial and unreal when the eye encounters the striations of the background, following their calligraphic features. There, the spatial significance of the wires dissipates, giving way to ambiguity and the indefinite, and composing a fugitive, illusory script which slides and dances across the field of vision, evading capture.