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.

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Click on the photo galley at left for a slide show of images, including several unpublished ones from Art + Auction's photo shoot.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

The hundreds, if not thousands, of square feet of fabric used in Neto’s sculptures is cut and sewn at his studio. Sometimes he buys the material already dyed—he has a contract with a Rio supplier for a certain shade of lilac that the factory has promised not to sell to anyone else. Other times he leaves it plain or dyes it himself. For this, his team fills up an inflatable swimming pool on the ground floor, where other heavy-duty work, such as cutting high-density foam, is performed. The cloth is then hung out in the backyard to dry.

Next, Neto spreads out the finished fabric on the top floor and “draws” where he wants the material to be cut by laying down a rope. “It gives me flexibility—I can change my mind far more easily than if I’d drawn in pencil,” he says. For his largest pieces, he rents the soccer field at the public high school across the street and lays out huge swaths of fabric all at once.

When it comes time to sew and assemble a major piece, Neto’s two staff seamstresses call in their sisters, grandmothers, daughters and cousins. Up to 20 women can fill the studio’s three floors, gossiping, laughing and eating as they work. The seamstresses have been with Neto for years and mostly know what he wants. They come from Rio’s periphery, often the favelas (as slums are called in Brazil), and rarely have any formal training. One was a maid when she came looking for work; Neto taught her how to use a needle and thread. “It’s the reality of Brazil,” he says. “Most people have very little formal education, but they’re creative. Because no one ever taught them how to do anything, they have to figure it all out from scratch, and they learn to use their imaginations.” He says that in Europe, where he’s stayed for long residencies, the artisans do fine work but get nervous when he asks for something unusual. “Here people just do it. If they don’t know how, they find someone else who does. Even with all the chaos here, I find it easier to get work done in Rio than in any other city in the world.”

Although Neto did not always create on such a large scale, he’s always worked with issues of balance and force, reason and sensuality. He entered university in Rio as an engineer but dropped out after a semester. A friend mentioned a sculpture class at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, which has produced some of Brazil’s top artists. “I was 19. I made my first sculpture, and I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life,” Neto says. He never went back to college. Instead, he heard that a Rio gallery—the now-closed Petite Galerie—was having an exhibition of younger sculptors and made an appointment to show his work. That led to his first solo show, in 1988.

Neto’s early sculptures, involving geometrically shaped iron slabs connected by a ligature, owed obvious debts to Russian Constructivists, American Minimalists and Brazilian neoconcretists, especially Lygia Clark. But even then, softness had a role.

He often used nylon stockings to hold the metal plates together and soon began filling them with lead ball bearings to experiment with weight and elasticity. “I first saw Neto’s work in 1989, in a small Rio gallery,” says Márcia Fortes, whose Galeria Fortes Vilaça, in São Paulo, represents the artist in Brazil. “All the elements that were to define his future body of work were already there: the preeminent organic form combined with a precise geometry, the concept of the work of art as a living organism, the use of gravity, the concern for balance and the soft, ordinary materials.”

Neto went on to replace lead with spices or Styrofoam balls, using the latter to create humanóides (humanoids) that one can sit on or hug and naves (ships) that one can enter. He built habitats out of foam and carved pathways inside them with a saw. “Neto is engaged with formalism, with how to use material and color,” says dealer Tanya Bonakdar, who staged his first New York show in 1996, after seeing his work at the home of Miami collector Rosa de la Cruz. “He’s one for the ages, but there’s also a warmth and generosity to his work that engages the public. When people walk into a show of his, they don’t just look around and walk out again. They stay.”

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.