Describing the art that Jesús Rafael Soto began to produce in the second half of the 1960s, the critic Alfredo Boulton wrote: “Soto’s great desire was to clothe space in visible materials, to construct it through optical reactions and make it ‘nervous’ . . . .” This is apt way to visualize Soto’s work from this period, one in which he began to use rods, either by suspending them or arranging them upright at ground level, to impart upon space a feeling of density. Space indeed seems to become “nervous.” It shimmers, shakes, and pulses as viewers navigate around and through his Penetrables, Virtual Volumes, Progressions, and Extensions, the repeated rods conjuring powerful optical sensations.

Pyramide, an edition issued by the venerable Galerie Denise René during the 1970s, is a small-scale rendition of Soto’s powerful environmental interventions. Speaking of Soto’s “Extensions,” for example, Boulton notes: “These works were like prolonged sculptures which sometimes become progressive at ground level in as much as their forms increased in proportion as the body of the work gradually acquired extension.” Here, however, the rods that compose Soto’s “Extensions” are limited to a square base, the rods progressing in height as they reach the middle. Rather than viewing a pyramid as a solid shape, however, Soto’s sculpture radically alters depending on one’s vantage point. From one perspective, it appears to be a dense thicket of rods, full of volume; from another, nearly two-dimensional. These optical ambiguities are a staple of Soto’s practice, one that he wielded to recast our understanding of space. Far from an empty vessel, space for Soto was vast, fluid, dense, and material. “. . . I have never sought to show reality caught at one precise moment,” the artist once mused, “but, on the contrary, to reveal universal change, of which temporality and infinitude are the constituent values. The universe, I believe, is uncertain and unsettled. The same must be true of my work.”