Almost Immaterial Vibration (Vibración casi inmaterial)

Postwar and Geometric Abstraction
My gallery Comment Tag Order Photography*
View comments
No comments have been posted yet.
Add a comment
Please log in to add comments.
Enter your LACMA Collections username.
Enter the password that accompanies your username.
New to our collections website? Sign up to create an account and start saving your favorites. Please note that this account is not the same as the MyLACMA account you may have for ticketing and membership transactions.
Current tags
This item has not been tagged yet.
Please log in to add tags.
Enter your LACMA Collections username.
Enter the password that accompanies your username.
New to our collections website? Sign up to create an account and start saving your favorites. Please note that this account is not the same as the MyLACMA account you may have for ticketing and membership transactions.
* Nearly 20,000 images of artworks the museum believes to be in the public domain are available to download on this site. Other images may be protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights. By using any of these images you agree to LACMA's Terms of Use.

Almost Immaterial Vibration (Vibración casi inmaterial)

Paris, 1963-1964
Paintings
Wood, wire, and paint
22 7/8 × 63 1/8 × 6 3/8 in. (58.1 × 160.34 × 16.19 cm)
Gift of the 2004 Collectors Committee (M.2004.60)
Latin American Art
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

For Jesús Rafael Soto, a pioneer of op art, the illusion of movement was a means of achieving an interactive relationship with the viewer: walk by one of his works, and the sense of motion intensifies...
For Jesús Rafael Soto, a pioneer of op art, the illusion of movement was a means of achieving an interactive relationship with the viewer: walk by one of his works, and the sense of motion intensifies. Almost Immaterial Vibration is among the first of his "classic" Escrituras (Writings)—optically vibrant paintings with hanging elements that resemble handwriting and seem to pulsate with energy. The Escrituras freed Soto from the confines of the surface, allowing him to "draw in space." On the right side of this two-part painting, the hanging rods are gray-green and appear to dissolve almost completely into the highly energized background. On the left, the rods are black and more individually distinguishable. Rather than representing the world around us, Soto's illusionism plays with the physical shortcomings of our eyes, creating a space in constant flux that we perceive as two-dimensional. It is the surface of this painting that appears to be in motion. Lynn Zelevansky, 2004
More...

Bibliography

  • Zelevansky, Lynn, V. L. Hillings, M. Peternák, B. LaBelle, P. Frank, I. Katzenstein, A. Le Blanc.  Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s.  Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.