By the mid-’90s, Neto was well on his way to international consecration, with solo museum exhibitions in Mexico City and Houston in 1998 and 1999, at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art in 2000 and a joint exhibition with Andy Goldsworthy at site Santa Fe. He represented Brazil in the 2001 Venice Biennale and has since exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel and the Hirshhorn in 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2003 and the Domaine de Kerguéhennec contemporary art center in Bignan, France, in 2005.

In Rome this month, Neto will be filling the fabric of his latest work with spices and sand. “I choose the filling based on the emotion I want, and then there’s the question of weight,” he says. “For this sculpture, I want spices in the sculpture’s center, its heart, to raise the emotional temperature, and then sand on the outside as a counterweight, to be cool and neutral.”

Yet for all these calculations, Neto is prepared, as always, to wing it a bit. “The first time that I’ll see the work is when I finish putting it up in the exhibition space. There are no trial runs.  Since I always work at the last minute, sometimes it’s just half an hour before the exhibition opens that I finally see it, and it’s always a surprise,” he says. “My knees are shaking, and disaster is close at hand. I always have a plan, but it’s like the plan for a journey. Once you’re on the road, you change things. If nothing changes, if you end up with something that’s just as you planned it, then you haven’t created art.”  

"Ernesto Neto" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.