The Edges of the World appear to be curiously located somewhere between the imagination of a science fiction author and the artificial reality of an animated children’s television programme, but they can be found, in vivid and tactile three-dimensional reality, projected straight from the mind of Ernesto Neto, sprawled across the top floor of the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank.
On ascending the staircase, you enter an alien environment, one enclosed by translucent, viscerally coloured mesh. Or as Neto describes it: the space discoverable beneath our own skin - the edge of our own physical world. In the first area, distinct works and installations are presented for inspection, including a pink heart-shaped pavilion. Neto’s characteristic lycra tulle stretched taught over its wooden frame, the mesh opening frilled like women’s knickers. Inside, a seating bank is adorned by drooping testicle-like sacks of stones, suggestive of the sexuality that lies at the root of human existence.\In the ajoining area, the installation opens out into a cohesive dream-like environment, created to fill the gallery; spaces within a space, like a complex network of human organs. Passageways and enclosures are formed by the tulle, stretched across frameworks of manufactured wooden sheets that slot together without the need for nails or glue. It’s an impressive, organic feat of engineering.
Stretched from floor to ceiling, the plush structures are reminiscent of padded cells. But if the erotically-charged shapes and bright colours lend a physcadelic edge to the space, it’s the joyful presence of other gallery-goers that plant this acid-fuelled invention firmly in ‘good trip’ territory. Interactive elements are threaded through the surreal composition, encouraging not only sight and touch, but smell - tulle pouches filled with herbs and spices tempt you to stand and sniff. The environment created is a positive one: friends lie together amicably on the cushioned floor, strangers meet by the extension of a hand through a hole between the passageways, children delight in the chance to interact with their surroundings as if in a play area.
Child-like wonder is an attitude Neto carfully cultivates in his work - in the past he has installed a ball pit in a gallery space. Half of the joy of Neto’s exhibition is watching the transformation of serious art-viewers as they take off their shoes and relish the sensuality of their surroundings in their colourful, sock-clad feet.
The white cube of the Hayward is a neutral setting for Neto. The gallery space rarely distracts from the art, although there are times - such as ascending the makeshift viewing platforms into the realm above the tulle and being greeted by the gallery lighting - that it does cause an industrial imposition. In the past Neto has created his art-worlds in more seemingly loaded settings, such as in the drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory and in this case Neto incorporated the setting into his art; building on the relationship between art and architecture. This does not feel the case inside the Hayward, however on the roof terraces, where the exhibition continues with a series of sculptural installations, the sprawling urban organism that is London creates a fitting backdrop to Neto’s biological inventions.
Neto’s exhibition is easily enjoyed. The surface-level pleasures of this tactile and aromatic environment are a safe haven from the city and, at times, from adulthood. It’s a place to enjoy, to connect, to observe human behaivour. But these sensous pleasures are knotted with an earthly awareness of the grittier sides of existence. Neto raises questions of what makes us human, of how the flesh and blood of our interior lives relate to the exterior world, and what spaces remain for our animal instincts in modern life. Serious thoughts, wrapped up in tulle.