Ernesto Neto is a Brazilian Conceptual artist whose installations offer a chance for the viewer to touch, see, smell, and feel his artworks for a truly sensory experience (Neto , 1999).
(Neto, 1999)
Since the late 1990s, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has created interactive, enveloping sculptural environments using translucent stretch fabric. Navedenga is one of the earliest works in this ongoing series. Its soft, sensuous surface, curving, taut contours, and rounded appendages evoke the human body, and its material is pliant and responsive to touch, like living skin. This form and the title of the work, a Portuguese neologism created by the artist, suggest both a fantastical spacecraft (nave means “ship”) and a protective womb. Aromatic cloves embedded in the structure add an olfactory dimension to the visual and tactile experience of the work. Viewers are invited to enter the works hollow chamber two at a time (Neto, 1998).
I found this piece of art matching my interior ideas when searching for more organic shape for my room, part of a project inspired by Frei Otto’s tensile structures.
White Bubble (2013/17) is based on one of the elements of Hyper Event Horizon, included in Neto’s 2014 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The artist reshaped and adapted it to the space created by Frank Gehry’s iconic architecture. The piece explores the limits of the human body, transforming the approach to art from visual into a multi-sensory moment while drawing the viewer’s attention to the purest sensations as perceived from the surfaces of the universe constructed by Neto. The artist intends for visitors to merge with the piece, encouraging them to experience the encounter as something that goes beyond and transforms them. Walking through it, the viewer feels how the translucent structure changes with their weight and the trace they leave behind is transformed by the marks of the human bodies coming later.
White Bubble constitutes a valuable exploration and reflection on the limits of the human body. In Neto’s exhibitions, the museum is transformed into a space for poetry: “We are constantly receiving information, but I want this to be a place where we stop thinking.”
(Neto, 2013)
Searching for an experiment with tensile fabrics I found that Neto’s bubble resembles a lot my idea of the floor in my Frei Otto’s inspired hotel room project which has to provoke people’s sensation of weight and balance.
1826681 alexandrina savova 