The New Décor19th June – 5th September
Haywood Gallery: Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX
Opening Hours: Daily, 10am–6pm; Friday until 10pm
What Ernesto Neto has created with his site-specific installation at Southbank’s Hayward Gallery is an opportunity for each visitor to really experience art for themselves. He encourages us to fully immerse ourselves sensually in his work, to feel and smell the sculptures, going as far as providing in-built, fur-lined gloves with the library mind table for immediate sensory participation.
Much about Neto’s work is light and playful; his trademark polyamide tulle fabric that stretches gauze-like across, above and under you as you negotiate the installation, the muted colour scheme of pinks, greens and greys that softens the bright light as it streams through the translucent material, piles of pebbles that provide weight and tension to stretch, shape and hold the structures in place and pockets of spice mixture sewn into the sculpture walls. In this haptic playground that he has created adults are free to take easy and obvious delight from any object in their surroundings in the way a child would.
The Edges of the World also works to slow us down. horizonmembranenave is covered with stretched, green tulle, including the floor space. Having removed your shoes you enter and immediately grasp the strangeness of walking on a floor that isn’t solid, as though walking on soft and uneven ground through long grass. Each move is considered, each step taken slowly and gingerly. This strange sensation forces you to ease off. With a sense of awareness suddenly heightened it’s possible to feel childishly giddy at the pleasure of this sensation. Neto has managed to create a space that is at once a powerful sensory experience and a site for inspiration and contemplation.
But beyond the frisky, tactile facade it’s the artist’s defiance is detectable too. This is the Hayward Gallery’s opening exhibition since closing for refurbishment, yet Neto denies it the opportunity to show off the space, dictating his own labyrinth architecture within the existing architecture of the gallery. The ceilings are lowered by false ceilings of skin-like, stretchy material. The walls are similarly camouflaged. In addition to the gallery’s own stairways, Neto places shaky, wooden staircase structures throughout his installation to disrupt the gallery flow and create platforms that afford a view of the installation from above. Winding passages are built and pathways are laid down where they didn’t previously exist to guide the visitor through Neto’s room and tunnel structure. He positively defies the shape of the made-over gallery, closing it down when perhaps the gallery’s intention was to open it up, squeezing out the space to make it cosy and intimate. We’re forcibly pushed together and visitors will brush against one another as they negotiate Neto’s playground in the same way that we experience walking outside on London streets.
The city is clearly a source of inspiration for the artist evident in one installation piece; a map of the squiggly, criss-crossing borders of London’s boroughs. Ideas of borders, boundaries and limits are ever present in Ernesto Neto’s work. Despite resisting conformation to the gallery space in one way, he simultaneously benefits from the architecture of the Hayward Gallery, exploiting the outdoor sculpture galleries to examine tensions between exterior and interior space, experimenting with robustness and legality of dividing lines. One outdoor space is hosting H2O-SFLV a swimming pool (and what can be more immersive, sensuous and playful than that?) with a dome shaped sculpture at its centre and flanked on either side by yellow, tent-like changing rooms. Open pockets in the walls of the changing rooms allow swimmers to poke arms through and be simultaneously inside the changing room and outside. These boundaries are so fragile and to move across them is not simply to leave one space behind but to gain a new space. Similarly, inside the galleries, sculptures within sculptures exist separated layers of fabric, rooms are created by flimsy partitions and on the viewing platforms of just take me out of the groun’ visitors partially and momentarily exist in a hidden layer of sculpture, watching visitors moving in the installation below from what feels like an outer position.
With the materials that he uses and the manner in which he constructs his sculptures, questions of balance, fragility and uncertainty pervade Ernesto Neto’s work. The outdoor steel sculpture interacting rising leaves consists of interlocking, leaf-shaped steel plates, rising six metres high. Through the cut out slots in the steel leaves one can view a multitude of slices of London’s skyline. No bolts or welding was used by Neto in its construction, relying instead on gravity and balance. The four tonne sculpture rests on three legs but the central branch that reaches skyward bends in the wind. Is it stable? Uncertainty also applies to the fragility of the materials he uses throughout the exhibition; taut fabric and flimsy wooden structures. Will the installation last the duration of the exhibition? Will it survive the footfall and prodding hands? The impression is that Ernesto Neto is less concerned about preserving the integrity of the installation than with ensuring visitors fully immerse themselves and take away a sensory experience. Still, do try to get to The Edges of the World before it falls apart.
