November 5, 2025

10:30-10:40 a.m.
INTRODUCTION
Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP
Ariel Aisiks, Founder and President, ISLAA

10:40 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

 

ARNAULD PIERRE
Beyond material/immaterial: Soto’s antimateriality 

This presentation will take a fresh look at the notion of “immateriality” that permeates Soto's approach to science and art. Having become a commonplace in critical and historical reception, it tends to situate the artist's approach within an overly rigid dichotomy between the material and the immaterial. Instead, I propose to test a more precise notion, that of “antimateriality,” derived from quantum physics—a field of study dear to Soto. In this context, which is also that of the threats of the atomic age, antimatter refers less to the negation of matter than to an alternative state of it, shaped by radiation and nuclear energy. This approach also makes it possible to highlight—beyond their formal and aesthetic differences—Soto's relationship with the approaches of some of his contemporaries, such as Victor Vasarely and Yves Klein.

LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS
Jesús Soto, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica: Rotation, Nachleben and Return of the Square. Afterlives of Constructive Art in Latin America

Through a detailed analysis of an early work by Soto, his landmark Rotación (1952), this lecture will delve into various manifestations of the ‘constructive square’ in Latin America (notably Venezuela and Brazil). Soto’s Rotación functions as a metamorphic, conceptual, and antithetical deconstruction of Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), a sort of ‘modern nachleben’ of this signature constructive symbol. Almost contemporary to Soto’s Rotación, Lygia Clark’s Discovery of the Organic Line (1954) features a different field of survival for the constructive square, this time related to Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and Red Square (1915). If Soto proposed a diagrammatical reduction—a de-activation—of Malevich’s White on White, Clark presents a survival of the Black Square, its re-activation in the form of a pictorial mise en abyme, dismantling the genealogical rapport to Suprematism in favor of a topological shift, one that takes painting as place, and place as literal embodiment, ultimately accomplished as the funeral action (and resurrection) of the square by Hélio Oiticica’s last performance, To Return Earth on to Earth (1978).


Moderation: Mateus Nunes, Assistant Curator, MASP


12:30—1:30 p.m.
Break


2:00—3:30 p.m.

SEAN NESSELRODE MONCADA
Flux Matter: Soto's Vibrations

Soto’s 1957 work Première Vibration announces a decisive shift. Exchanging planar Plexiglas constructions for a less tidy, more materialized projection of found objects, it inaugurates the artist’s longstanding interest in vibration as a physical and metaphysical process. This lecture contemplates vibration as the key operation animating Soto’s oeuvre, an oscillatory motion that not only forms the conduit between matter and energy, but also grounds his work in the immediate extractive and atomic milieu of postwar modernity. As exercises in dematerialization and the perceptual production of a hybrid “energy-matter,” Soto’s Vibrations offer key insights into largely unacknowledged presumptions of energy distribution, the flow of capital, and the ontology of the material world that undergird our understanding of what it means to be modern.


JUAN LEDEZMA
Soto’s “Idea of a Country”

Jesús Soto recognized in Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s partitions of perforated concrete a means for “the destruction of the wall” and for rendering architecture “abstract.” Soto’s abstract work, conversely, became architectural through the obliterative transformation of the plane into discrete vibratory episodes, eventually spatialized in the environmental works called Penetrables. What in both cases bridged architecture and abstraction was the use of open structures that prompted the serialized layering of perceptions, so that the building or the work would register as repetitively changing constructions. This perceptual mode of constructive agency can be revealingly mapped onto notions of social action mobilized by the discourse that gained political prominence in Venezuela beginning in the 1960s. Articulating the fixity of a constructed order into the random event of its alteration, kinetic forms paralleled and even reconfigured this discourse’s exploration of ways of reconciling structural integrity with creative transformation. Their constructive logic itself offered a symbolic, if not allegorical, conduit for positing and working through what Soto called “the idea of a country.”


Moderation: Isabela Ferreira Loures, Curatorial Assistant, MASP


3:30—4:30 p.m.

PAOLA SANTOS COY
Spatial Scores

This lecture explores the relationship between Jesús Rafael Soto's work and music, situating it in an expanded terrain where vibration operates as an aesthetic category that articulates sound, matter, and perception. Since his early connections with serialism in Europe, Soto applied musical principles to the visual realm to establish his own methodology, which later led to spatial and bodily experiences such as vibrations and sonorous penetrables. Access to archival materials today opens the possibility of reading his production as a visual writing close to musical notation. The presentation proposes viewing Soto's practice as a sensitive transcription between disciplines, in which music ceases to be a mere referent and becomes an organizing principle of the aesthetic experience in space.


ESTRELLITA B. BRODSKY
Displacement as an Aesthetic Strategy: Jesús Soto in Paris, 1950–1970

This lecture examines the Paris years of Venezuelan Kinetic artist Jesús Soto, focusing on displacement as both an aesthetic principle and a critical strategy. Leaving Venezuela in 1950 amid political upheaval, Soto entered a dynamic Parisian scene where Latin American and European avant-gardes converged. Through networks such as Los Disidentes, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Art d’Aujourd’hui, and Galerie Denise René, he redefined abstraction around ideas of dematerialization and instability, destabilizing the art object and engaging the viewer as participant. Soto’s practice not only transformed European modernism but also articulated a distinctly Latin American vision of art as socially engaged and participatory, forging a new kinetic language rooted in displacement and exchange.



Moderation: Agustín Diez Fischer, Senior Manager of Research and Archives, ISLAA

4:30–5:30 p.m.
Break


5:30–6:30 p.m.

ARIEL JIMÉNEZ
Jesús Soto: Immaterials

This lecture aims to describe Jesús Soto's artistic processes between 1949 and 1962, in his desire to give visible form to one of the major concerns of modern times: the energy and immaterial forces that, in his view, govern the universe.



Moderation: Fernando Oliva, Curator, MASP
 

ARIEL JIMÉNEZ
Ariel Jiménez is a curator of modern and contemporary art. He studied Art History at the Sorbonne (DEA 1983), and curated exhibitions at public and private institutions in Venezuela, Latin America, and the United States. He was the director of the Education Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (1984–1986), director of the Sala Mendoza in Caracas (1989–1996), chief curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (1997–2011), and general director of the Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art in Ciudad Bolívar (2004–2006). He currently works as an independent curator and as curator of the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection. Jiménez has published several books on art in recent decades, including Conversaciones con Jesús Soto (Fundación Cisneros, 2001), a publication that compiles dialogues between the curator and the artist held over a period of almost ten years.

ARNAULD PIERRE
Arnauld Pierre is a professor of art history at Sorbonne University and a researcher at the Centre André Chastel in Paris. He has extensively published on optical and kinetic art in connection with the visual culture and scientific imagination of the period, including an essay entitled Magic Moirés. Gerald Oster et l'art des moirages (Macula, 2022). He also curated the retrospectives Nicolas Schöffer (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Villeneuve-d'Ascq, 2018) and Victor Vasarely: Le partage des formes (Centre Pompidou, 2019, with Michel Gauthier). Focusing on unusual forms of visual perception, he also worked to define the contours of a pop-kineticism rooted in popular culture. Pierre wrote extensively about Soto’s work, mainly for exhibition catalogues, such as for the exhibitions Soto at Jeu de Paume (1997), Jesús Rafael Soto at the Museum of Fine Arts of Kaohsiung in Taiwan (2000), Soto – A Gran Escala at Museo de Arte de Contemporáneo de Caracas (2003), among others.

ESTRELLITA B. BRODSKY
Estrellita B. Brodsky is a curator, collector, and philanthropist dedicated to advancing the visibility of Latin American art and its diasporas. She holds a PhD in art history from New York University (NYU)’s Institute of Fine Arts and a Master’s from Hunter College. Brodsky has curated landmark exhibitions, including Carlos Cruz-Diez: (In)formed by Color (Americas Society, 2008); Jesús Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950–1970 (Grey Art Gallery, NYU, 2012); and Julio Le Parc: Form into Action (Pérez Art Museum Miami, PAMM, 2016–17; which later traveled to Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 2017). In 2015, she founded ANOTHER SPACE, a nonprofit exhibition program of the Daniel and Estrellita B. Brodsky Foundation, where she has directed and curated research-based exhibitions and public programming focused on global appreciation of Latin American art. Brodsky has taught at Hunter College, and has lectured and written extensively on Post-War Latin American art.

JUAN LEDEZMA
Juan Ledezma received his PhD in the History of Western Art (20th and 21st Centuries) from Columbia University, New York, in 2009. In 2006, he curated The Sites of Latin American Abstraction at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), in Miami. The exhibition examined the relationship between Latin American concrete art and urban photography as two modes of constructing a collective viewer. It was followed by similar endeavors, such as the exhibitions Vibration (Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2010) and Gebaute Vision (Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, 2011). Ledezma has presented his scholarship at public events and written book chapters on the avant-garde design of exhibition spaces, the perceptual agency of modernism, and Latin American abstraction’s contribution to the formation of a critical public sphere through strategies of spectatorial engagement.

LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS
Luis Pérez-Oramas (Caracas, 1960) is a poet, art historian, and curator. He received his PhD in Art History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris (1994), and was a Professor of Art History at the Université de Haute Bretagne, France (1987-1991); École Régionale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France (1992-1994); and the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, Caracas, Venezuela (1994-2000). Pérez-Oramas served as the Curator of Latin American Art at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York (2003-2017), the Curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection in Caracas (1994-2002), and the Curatorial Director of the 30th São Paulo Biennial (2011-2013). He is the author of several exhibition catalogues, seven volumes of essays, and eleven volumes of poetry.

PAOLA SANTOS COY
Paola Santos Coy is a Mexican curator and writer of contemporary art with a focus on site-specific projects, art and architecture, and social interaction dynamics. She served as Director of the Museo Experimental El Eco (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM) from 2012 to 2023 and is currently Associate Curator at TAE (Transformación, Arte y Educación) in the Yucatán Peninsula. Together with Tatiana Cuevas, she co-curated Jesús Rafael Soto: Vision in Motion (Museo Tamayo, 2005) and Jesús Rafael Soto: The Instability of the Real (RGR, 2023). Santos Coy and Cuevas are also preparing a forthcoming book with RGR under the same title. She has also worked at Museo Tamayo, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, and in international biennials.

SEAN NESSELRODE MONCADA 
Sean Nesselrode Moncada is Associate Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the author of Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela (2023), which received the ALAA–Arvey Foundation Book Award, the Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book on Venezuela, and the Visual Culture Studies Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association. His writings have appeared in numerous journals and exhibition catalogues, including Architectural Theory Review, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Caiana, and Gego: Measuring Infinity. He is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.