José Soto
Aurora / 2017

Created for the 2017 Occupy Museums – Whitney Biennial, this piece José explores the boundaries of op art and photography. Using layers of superimposed images carefully cut into concentric shapes that tricks the eye into the illusion of depth.

Aurora (2017)

“arteFITS Foundation is a unique philanthropic foundation.
They are goal oriented, extremely resourceful and composed of a very professional and knowledgeable staff. As an guest artist they will go above and beyond to aid and support you as the project is developed. I regard Fits Art Foundation as a world class art residency and encourage artists to apply.
 

I use photography, video, sculpture and installation to transform the complex visual structures of nature into artistic objects. Grounded in the formal and aesthetic strategies of Formalism, Minimalism and the Gestalt principles, my work invites the viewer to consider his or her own perception of form and light in the natural landscape.

Recently, I have furthered my artistic exploration by creating a series of wall bound sculptures and installations, made of white Plexiglas, in which the geometric abstractions of natural forms are repeated, re-imagined, and filled with light. Forms appear multistable, popping back and forth between alternative interpretations. These geometric structures are diagrams of the kind of order that can be seen in nature. Through their patterns and repetitions the work evoke the rhythms of the universe. They call to mind the concepts of sacred geometry as well as Plato’s Timaeus and his account of the formation of the universe.

The use of industrial materials like Plexiglas and LED lights, and a technology like laser cutting, are indicators of the economy where my works are inscribed.”

José Soto

“José Soto has taken images from Fox Television’s Good Day New York and edited out all the words, leaving just the breath that precedes each phrase spoken on the show. “I realized that there was a sound pattern generated by the reporter’s breathing that could be extracted through editing. What I wanted to do was create a new experience for the viewer, one that could reveal the moment of truth: the moment when this public figure is forced, by the need to breathe, to be a human being and a part of nature.” The artist employs images from the mass media as a strategy for playfully showing us our inescapable need for two things: breathing as the source of life, and the morning news. In his photographic work he explores the Formalism and German Gestalt theories to further understand “what makes beauty.” ”

Arlette de la Serna, Curator


Excerpt from the essay for the exhibition 11 in 2011: Video-Art and Experimental Film at the Museo de Arte Ponce (about José Soto’s Morning Breeze video, included in the show), Ponce, PR (2011)

“José Soto is a young artist who has departed from the path followed by most photographers in Puerto Rico. Since the days of Jack Delano to the present our photography has focused on the human face. Accustomed as we are to the portrait that reveals social realities, the enamored or changed landscape, or images of our urban and domestic surroundings, Soto’s photographs come across as shocking and pleasing at the same time. In them the recognizable world vanishes and we enter a strange terrain, some sort of science-fiction landscape or animated film, that suggests laboratory petri dish or the pattern formed by marble veins. In his work we encounter little spheres that defy gravity, gentle craters and lines of undulating force, suggestive of contorted bodies. Distanced from the faces of our people, our monuments or desires, in other words, from our immediate reality, these photographs present us with a playful and mysterious world, both pleasant and intimidating, one that invites introspection (…) Perhaps the most important meditation that these works elicit is about our expectations regarding contemporary art. Accustomed to novelty and biting irony, to disgust as therapy against complacency, these works come across as shocking because of their beauty and sincerity.”

Mercedes Trelles Hernández


Excerpt from Sincerity, Trelles’ essay for the catalog of the exhibition José Soto: Recent Works, Walter Otero Gallery and Viota Gallery, Güaynabo, PR (2009)

“Soto has been working on abstract photography for years, creating visual universes with liquids that, by being photographed, suggest the world of cells, the veins of marble, or the world of outer space. However, in the work included in this exhibition, the visible world and its references are completely present and Soto shows how simple an abstraction can be: by changing the orientation of the photo, the world looses its boundaries and nature appears, like in Russian Formalism, like something strange and therefore, something abstract.”

Mercedes Trelles Hernández

 Excerpt from Sincerity, Trelles’ essay for the catalog of the exhibition José Soto: Recent Works, Walter Otero Gallery and Viota Gallery, Güaynabo, PR (2009)

“Soto has been working on abstract photography for years, creating visual universes with liquids that, by being photographed, suggest the world of cells, the veins of marble, or the world of outer space. However, in the work included in this exhibition, the visible world and its references are completely present and Soto shows how simple an abstraction can be: by changing the orientation of the photo, the world looses its boundaries and nature appears, like in Russian Formalism, like something strange and therefore, something abstract.”

Mercedes Trelles-Hernández, Curator


Excerpt from of the essay for the exhibition 35 Years of Photography in Puerto Rico, National Art Exhibition at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, San Juan, PR (2011)

“Acknowledging the difference in scale between the camera obscura and the daguerreotype, Soto explores landscapes in a deliberately small format, forcing us to observe through a receding frame that subsides into a funnel-like shape and fixes our gaze in an interior, which happens to be an exterior that we know is huge but we see on an intimate scale. Created in transparencies and brightened up by light, these landscapes in negative shine as if they were unreal, providing the strange experience that the first daguerreotypes must have caused. This miniature landscape disorients us and yet allows us to gain awareness of photography as a medium for fiction.”

Lilliana Ramos-Collado, Writer and Curator
Excerpt from the essay for the exhibition Puerto Rico: Puerta al paisaje at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Juan, PR (2013)