In the Studio: Ernesto Neto

Jacob Lagvad

Ernesto Neto in his Rio studio, with bags full of fabric and plastic balls

Guillaume Blanc, courtesy of Ernesto Neto

Detail of a 2007 spice-filled work that is a smaller version of the artist's upcoming installation at Rome's Museum of Contemporary Art. Neto does not consider such works models, but rather fully realized pieces.

Alexander Calder Constantin Brancusi Andy Goldsworthy Ernesto Neto Detroit Institute to Sell Art, But Not Its Own Slim and Conservative, Sotheby’s Sale Proves a Winner Recession Creeps Up on Basel At River's Edge

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Click on the photo galley at left for a slide show of images, including several unpublished ones from Art + Auction's photo shoot.

  Ernesto Neto’s sculptures may have conquered the world, but the Brazilian artist himself always comes back to Rio de Janeiro. In recent years he has filled museums in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Asia with tens of thousands of square feet of Lycra and polyamide fabric in impossibly delicate, udderlike structures laden with powdered clove, saffron, lead pellets, sand and Styrofoam balls. While visitors discover a feast for their senses, critics praise Neto’s evocation of Calder, Brancusi and the Brazilian neoconcretists, as well as his exploration of gravity and tension. In Leviathan Thot, his 2006 installation at the Panthéon in Paris, a vast construction of gossamer fabric and pendulous counterweights stretched from the top of the building’s 200-foot-high dome to the floor.

It is that kind of ambitious sculpture that the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (macro) has commissioned to be exhibited in its principal space, the monumental Glass Gallery, from May 29 through March 2009. “Neto is one of the few artists who both engage the viewer’s imagination and offer a polysensorial experience,” macro curator Dobrila Denegri says. “His immersive environments, his architectural or sculptural habitats, create a zone where organic and artificial are blurred, and categories like body and mind, sense and intellect, creation and decay are in constant flux.”

Neto is planning a 23-foot-wide, 50-foot-high piece resembling a giant chandelier of polyamide tulle (a fabric commonly used in women’s underwear) and wood, with tassels containing 1,500 pounds total of black pepper, powdered cloves, turmeric, ginger and sand. “I think of this sculpture as if it were a flower—it has to have petals and color and also perfume,” says Neto. Like many of his recent works, it is meant to be entered and touched as well as seen and smelled.

For this, as for so much of the 43-year-old artist’s oeuvre, the inspiration comes from his hometown of Rio. When he was growing up, in the 1970s, “the whole city was a big construction site,” says Neto, whose father was a building engineer. “Today, whenever I hear or even smell construction, it brings me back to my childhood.” Yet building in Rio, where mountains surge from the sea and the ground is often sandy, is no easy task. “One of my favorite architects, José Zanine Caldas, made houses that balance on cliffs above the ocean. He is about danger and equilibrium.”

Neto’s love for his city is as generous as his work. Every New Year’s Eve he throws a party on Ipanema beach. He installs a sound system on the sand, lets peddlers sell drinks and welcomes all comers to dance the New Year in. It was this writer’s first vision of Neto: an exuberant man with long curly brown hair dancing with his wife by the water amid international art world friends, Rio buddies and locals who happened to hear the music. “All around me people are playing, talking, having a beer,” he says of the beach scene. “This is the kind of environment I want to create in museums and galleries: a place where people have a sensorial relation with their environment and where they can interact socially.”

Neto works in Rio’s historic downtown, near the train station made famous in the 1998 Walter Salles movie Central Station. A three-floor former printer’s shop on a quiet street of modest retail stores, the studio is unassuming and, on a recent summer day in late January, baking hot. There’s no air-conditioning; the windows are flung open, and wall-mounted fans whir in an attempt to combat the awesome heat.

Each of Neto’s giant sculptures begins as a bird’s-eye-view rendering, somewhat like an architect’s floor plan. From there he makes drawings that document elevation views of the proposed work and patterns of light in the exhibition space. He also decides on what fill materials he’ll use. Since the large works are site specific, they don’t take their final shape until Neto and his assistants arrive at the designated location. “My work is very liquid, very adaptable,” Neto says. “When I plan, I always leave room to adapt it to the space, to improvise, to be inspired.”