Page 15 - Studio International - January 1966

Grand Relation: Soto's Writings fall into a quite different category.
16 black and 8 silver squares
Silver and black plaques on wood The artist's complex snares in which the eye loses its
62 1/2 x 42 in. orientation are set up in our own space, in that very
Purchased by the Tate Gallery
from the Soto Retrospective space in which we ourselves move and live. The work
at Signals, London
is no longer set at a distance from reality, it is no longer
simply a window on an imaginary world, a porthole
through which the eye of the observer securely fixed
in familiar space could experience for a moment the
ideas and anguish which beset the artist when he
created his work. On the contrary, the work now
intrudes upon reality and our own comfortable idea of
space and puts in question our preconceived notions.
Let us examine one of the 'immaterial curves' recently
completed by Soto. Confronted with symbols which
move and alter, join and separate incessantly in front
of our eyes we do not know—in this perpetually
changing play of the imagination, this complex move-
ment of forms which all the time advance, withdraw,
disappear and reappear—where to set our gaze or how
to recreate the traditional dimensions of that space in
which we are accustomed to live. Our visual bearings
and mental habits are lost in this world which we cannot
define with certainty as either two-dimensional or
three-dimensional, in this limbo which passes the
ultimate limit of logic, in this journey of the eye along an
endless maze beyond the bounds of our reasoned
structures. The immutable, reassuring concept of space
which was hitherto a point of reference and a support
for the observer is now put in question.
Soto's 'infernal machine'—especially when it is built
up on an architectural scale, as was the case with the
wall at the Signals exhibition—threatens that space
in which we live and in which we felt so secure. Fiction
impinges upon reality until the two became inseparable.
One work of no great size is sufficient to set a whole
area of real space in which I live sliding into the abyss.
Grand Relation Space as a whole—my own vital space—undergoes a
Blue and black 1965
Painted metal plaques strange transformation. Between the hallucinations
superimposed on painted wood described by Paul Klee and the real vertigo felt in front
62 x 42 in.
Collection: Paul Keeler, Windsor of one of Soto's vibrations there is the same difference
for the observer as there would be between seeing a
film of experiments in weightlessness and on the other
hand actually participating in such experiments.
These simple Writings of Soto reveal to the full the
artist's privilege of recreating reality. Where does the
dividing line between fiction and reality fall ? Tomorrow
we shall understand the world through works such as
these which are still enigmatic and are themselves a
fundamental product of our age; they express intuit-
ively, better than any manual could do, the complex
inter-relationship of space and time and the new links
revealed by science between energy and matter.
At a time when a whole army of dwarf Picabias
argue and fight noisily over the leftovers of the dadaist
movement, these simple, clear and realistic works,
nourished on a secret, overwhelming complicity with
modern life and the spirit of our age, point out to us the
direction in which the dignity and grandeur of con-
temporary art lie. 'The chosen artists', wrote Paul Klee,
'are those who touch upon the secret depths where all
evolution begins from the most fundamental law of all
. . . where the organic centre of all movement, in both
space and time—no matter whether we choose to call
it the brain or the heart of creation—determines all the
processes within the heart of nature, at the depths of
creation where lies, closely guarded, the secret key to
the universe ...' n

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