ERNESTO NETO
A sculpture can be anything that can stand upright

Using solid materials like PVC, wood and steel to made interconnecting pieces of various shapes and sizes, Ernesto Neto (Rio de Janeiro, 1964) surprises us with a new exhibition at the Galería Elba Benítez. Though quite distinct in appearance, all these pieces revolve around movement, atmosphere, chance and the quotidian. They are artworks that reflect and express life, sprouting unexpectedly from the ground and inviting the spectator to interact with them.

Ernesto Neto conceives his artworks as stages of performance, artistic and sensorial places of experimentation where both physical interaction and smell play fundamental roles. He creates playful universes where people can enter into a state of sociability, talking, laughing and basically unburdening themselves of their most rational thoughts and prejudices. “I delight in translating into my works all the drive and energy that we might find, for example, at a party when people stop acting like they do ordinarily and abandon their habitual behavioural patterns”.

The exhibition at the Galería Elba Benítez comes in the wake of the artist’s residence for 6 months at the Atelier Calder (Sache, France) where he experimented with a variety of laser-cut solid materials for the first time. This produced rounded pieces highly reminiscent of children’s toys, except on a much larger scale. The pieces slot together without nails or screws to make a kind of chain with hundreds of potential forms, but whose connecting thread is balance and gravity: qualities that are essential to Neto’s sculpture.
In this manner, by making toys into sculpture, he de-hierarchizes art and builds, as the artist explains, “a space that works like a series of organisms, cells or amoebae that we can arrange”.

Born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, the city where he lives and works, Neto is one of the leading figures of the contemporary Brazilian art scene. He is a successor to the so-called Neo-Concretist movement that emerged in Brazil in the fifties and sixties as a reaction to the mechanical and scientific trend of Concrete Art. Seeking a return to humanism and to art as an instrument for building societies, artists such as Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark placed the spectator for the first time at the centre of the creative act.

Ernesto Neto has taken part in numerous solo and group shows around the globe. Over the past two years he made monumental installations for venues such as the Jacobs Building of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (California), the MIMOCA Foundation (Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art) in Japan, and the Pantheon in Paris, on occasion of the city’s 35th Autumn Festival. He has represented his country at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and at the 5th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2005). He has taken part in exhibitions at institutions such as the Tate Modern (London), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the MNAM Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the MoMA (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea CGAC (Santiago) the MOCA (Los Angeles) and the Kunsthalle (Basel), to mention just a few.

Luisa Espino