Jesús Rafael Soto's Negro y Color (Black and Color) (1995) extends the principles of his Ambivalencias series into the artist's mature late work. Begun in the late 1970s as an evolution of his earlier Vibraciones, the Ambivalencias introduced bold color into Soto's optical equation — recognized today as one of the defining phases of his career, alongside the Agujas, Vibraciones, and Penetrables.

The composition divides into two registers. Across the upper half, a grid of low-relief black squares projects subtly from a black ground, an architecture of light and shadow. The lower half erupts into a black-and-white striped backdrop overlaid with colored squares — red, yellow, ultramarine, emerald, violet, ochre, brown — floating forward on shallow supports. As the viewer moves before the piece, the stripes set the panels into apparent vibration, the eye unable to fix them in stable space.

Soto led the kinetic movement alongside Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, and Victor Vasarely, drawing on physics, mathematics, music, and color theory. His commissions placed his work inside UNESCO's Paris headquarters (1969), the Grand Hall de la Régie Renault (1975), and the Volume Virtuel at the Centre Pompidou (1987). Works are held by the Tate, MoMA, Museum Ludwig, and Centre Georges Pompidou. Still undervalued relative to his European peers, Soto offers here a defining example of postwar optical art.