Soto : une traversée cinétique

Soto: a kinetic passage — an immersive work by Jesús Rafael Soto at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine

Composed of thousands of thin, flexible yellow tubes suspended from a structure, this monumental installation, presented on May 20, 2026 at 9:00 AM at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine – Palais de Chaillot, invites you to enter an experience that engages all your senses.

Settled in Paris in 1950, the Venezuelan-born artist became known for paintings, reliefs and sculptures whose geometric offsets trap the eye in colored patterns that shift with our slightest movements.

His series, begun in 1967 and quickly named “Pénétrable,” had its first monumental version on the forecourt of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1969. It continued notably with Pénétrable BBL jaune in 1999, which is now presented at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine.

Made up of thousands of thin, flexible yellow tubes suspended from a metal framework, the work is less a sculpture to be contemplated than an immersive “environment,” simultaneously optical, mobile and tactile. A Pénétrable offers an experience played out at the scale of real space and architecture, within a vibrating cloud of flexible lines that one crosses like a forest, a river or even a fog.

From the outside, the Pénétrable appears as a simple parallelepiped, a large, colored and vibrating volume of more than 150 cubic meters. Open on all sides, it invites people to enter and move freely within it. Very quickly, the apparent stability of the whole disappears: the experience is fluctuating and constantly replayed. The contours of the structure vanish, human silhouettes blur, and distances become uncertain.

When several people move within this shared bath, they no longer breathe only the same air but inhabit the same space. The body itself becomes an instrument for perceiving a pure color that is now atmospheric and spatialized: we walk, brush against and feel the long strands on our skin, just as our eyes register the constant pulsations of color. The experience thus engages touch as much as bodily awareness, our bodies continually grazed by the colored threads.

Although it can be playful and pleasant, this particular immersion is not trivial. Soto overturns the traditional aesthetic relationship insofar as the work surrounds the viewer, rather than the viewer facing the work or walking around it. Each passage produces a different configuration, and the object continually eludes us. In essence, Soto establishes a space that is neither stable nor homogeneous, where the usual boundaries between seeing, touching and inhabiting are porous.