PAST EXHIBITIONS

MADNESS IS PART OF LIFE BY ERNESTO NETO

SEPTEMBER 29TH, 2012JANUARY 6TH, 2013

Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is delighted to welcome worldwide-acclaimed Brazilian Artist Ernesto Neto and his protégé, video artist Evandro Machado, in a show of a new format: Mentoring young Artists.

Curator of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo 5^th exhibition, Madness is part of Life, Ernesto Neto reconfigures and reinterprets the gallery’s high-ceiling and glazed wall space through four newly-created pieces.

Around Life is a body we are part of, a vast sculpture from the series Balanço (Swing) that brings visitors up in the air to (re)discover the Tokyo cityscape and architecture in a relaxed environment, three works pursue previous researches and series around themes dear to the Artist.

Humanity is questioned through each and every one of these pieces. Conceived as a perception of reality through the weight of things, inherited from the Brazilian Post-Neo Concrete of artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, Humanity is also referred to as “physically structured in the relation”. For Neto, the combination of parts is not only a mental exercise but also a physical operation. It is to this physical dimension, and to this specific way of understanding and reflecting to the space and the life, that we invite you.

While Linhas pontos e patas draws a line on the wall, TorusMacroCopula points to the ceiling, in an evocation of Prumo and Peso, pieces from the 1980s, and Pedras, an aggregation of balls in the same stretchy material, invites the visitor to see, sit, touch, walk and think.

Along those four pieces, each investigating a different way to occupy and/or define the space, Evandro Machado shows a variation of a pre-existing work, Ferrolho, a semi-fictional work set in Rio de Janeiro urban scape.

Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo would like to express its appreciation and gratitude to Ernesto Neto and his Studio Atelienave (Rio de Janeiro), to Tomio Koyama Gallery (Tokyo) and to the Embassy of Brazil in Tokyo for their enduring support during the preparation of the exhibition.

ARTISTS

Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto (1964) lives and works in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. It is also where he studied at Escola de Artes Visuais Parque Lage and then at Museu de Arte Moderna and where he had his first solos exhibitions. Since his first solo show at Petit Galerie in 1988, Neto has had yearly solo shows among which in 1992, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; 1994, Galeria Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo. In the wake of his solo show at Zolla-Lieberman Gallery in Chicago in 1996, Neto’s works have been prominently displayed abroad, from Venezuela, to the United States. Ernesto Neto also represented Brazil in 2001 at the 49^th Venice Biennale, at the main venue Plateau of Humankind and in the Brazilian Pavilion.
Among the prominent shows of the recent years - no less than fifty in a period of ten years - we can cite La Lengua de Ernesto: Retrospectiva 1987 – 2011, Museu de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey (2011-2012); Hiper Cultura Loucura en el Vertigo del Mundo, Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires (2011); The Edges of the World, Hayward Gallery, London (2010); Dengo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, (2010). His greatest installation Anthropodino was realized at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2009.
As of today, his works are part of the best public collections worldwide, from 21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Japan), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (Norway), CAC Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Malága, Málaga (Spain), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (USA), Centre Pompidou - Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris (France), Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Minas Gerais (Brazil), Fundació La Caixa, Barcelona (Spain), Fundación Televisa, México, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (USA), to name just a few.

Guest Artist
Evandro Machado

Born in Blumenau (1973), Machado lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. At the age of 16, Machado started as a newspaper cartoonist. After his first trip to Europe in 2006, for the Program Dynamic Encounters in London, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he studied at the School of Arts Visuals of Parque Lage, learning with Charles Watson, Fernando Cocchiarale, Chico Cunha, Franz Manata, Luiz Ernesto, Márcio Botner and Grória Ferreira.

He first exhibited in Rio de Janeiro in 2008: Parque Lage (Galeria Ana Maria Niemayer, RJ), NAU (Instituto de Arquitetura do Brasil, RJ) and Abre-Alas 5 (A Gentil Carioca, RJ). In 2009, he participated in Paisagens Improváveis (Ateliê Subterrânea, RS) and was featured in a TV program on TV Futura alongside artists such as, Marcos Chaves, Franz Manata and Anna Bella Geiger from Mundial Health Organization. In 2010, in addition to his participation in Kxa Preta (Espaço Apis, RJ and Abotoados pela Manga (São Paulo), his work Paisagens Vermelhas was also included in a presentation of Brazilian art video in London.

In 2011, Machado had a solo show at Atelier Hermès (SP). He also exhibited pieces at Como o Tempo Passa Quando a Gente se Diverte, in Casa Triângulo (SP) Gallery, at the 43˚ Salão Nacional de Piracicaba, and at Curta Cinema held at A Gentil Carioca Gallery. In 2012, Machado exhibited at Gramática Urbana, in downtown Rio, at Hélio Oiticica Center, and Dimensões Variáveis at A Gentil Carioca Gallery.

ARTWORKS

Madness is part of Life

This title refers to common situations in our lives today, political correctness and productive time. The valorization of the human is about productivity over humanist qualities, the closer to machines, the better it is.
Madness has been a part of society, something that must be controlled, hidden by medication as if it were the right thing to do, but right for whom? The world is full of passion; it is a little madness that lives inside and around us…. We need it!

A vida é um corpo do qual fazemos parte, 2012
Life is a body we are part of

polypropylene + polyester string and plastic balls
780 x 786 x 1486 cm

drawing: courtesy of the Artist
photos: ©Louis Vuitton / Jérémie Souteyrat

work with the support of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo

Through this title we would like to challenge some human positions which place us at the center of the universe, multiverse, etc. The idea that takes our mind out of our body as if it were something supernatural beyond nature, as culture would be out of nature and not part of it. Life is bigger than us and we are part of it; if there is a God, God is nature, we are a special little part, but still a part
It is a sculpture from the family Balanço (Swing), made of a skin and a catwalk, this catwalk is in suspension, and people are able to walk, sit or lay down on it. In the case of LIBWPO (Life Is a Body We Are Part Of) , the piece is made up of two parts: Zoid aisle up and the ovule living room. It is a sculpture to be experienced. We also have the idea to lift people up close to the glass building in such a way that would cause them to experience some vertigo, or at least deal with the feeling of floating in the “Sky”. The piece is a work which deals with stability – how we move, desire and fear. With this work, we try to create a place that is body or animal-like, and at the same time a landscape for ourselves. The door is the portal between these two universes, or the continuity of them. The walls’ skin on the piece is made with interconnected spiral crochet cells. The body catwalk is made of “Roe Cells” – tubes full of plastic balls.

*TorusMacroCopula*, 2012
*TorusMacroVault*

polypropylene + polyester string and plastic balls
780 x 120 x 120 cm

photos: ©Louis Vuitton / Jérémie Souteyrat

work with the support of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo

This is a recreation in macro scale of a work from 1989 called *Copula Invertida*, a combination of two others works called *Prumo* and *Peso* (Plumb and Weight). During that time, I was shifting away from a kind of post concrete /constructive proposal to a bio-concrete project, where I had found a way to realize some works where I could feel the flesh and the stocking skin and the lead balls as content. I was also looking, in some way, to develop something that looked like some womb and roe ideas of fertilization, seeds… TorusMacroCopula…. is a macro vision of it – a skin full of pores and bigger Balls “Eggs” – with some topological inversion of space.

Linhas, Pontos e Patas, 2012
Lines, Dots and Legs

polypropylene + polyester string and plastic balls
120 x 410 x 50 cm

photos: ©Louis Vuitton / Jérémie Souteyrat

work with the support of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo

Pedras I, II, 2012
Stones I, II

polypropylene + polyester string and plastic balls
I 45 x 240 x 90 cm
II 45 x 335 x 75 cm

work with the support of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo

Guest Artist
Evandro Machado

Ferrolho

Animation
2’36’’

work with the support of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo
photos: courtesy of the Artist

Ferrolho is a video I did to portray the eye, like a metaphor, when it converts itself into a solid metallic object.
It changes the sense of what is fragile – is it the eye of the observer or the landscape?
There are conflicts between the nature of these things when the iron ball (the eye) demolishes the building and floats over the structure of the city.
At the same time, there is an internal world, living inside the ball, which is like a micro landscape of the artist's brain.