Galeria Fortes Vilaça has pleasure in presenting O Abraço do Tempo…Jazz [Time's Embrace…Jazz], an exhibition of collaborative works by the Rio de Janeiro artists Ernesto Neto and Carlos Bevilacqua. The show indicates the limitations and potentialities of shared creation, and presents sculptures produced over 2006 that combine elements from each artist's personal repertoire.

Neto and Bevilacqua have been part of the Brazilian artistic scene for nearly twenty years; from the time they shared a studio in Rio de Janeiro. They took part in group shows together, but then went their separate ways. Their first formal collaboration only came about in 2004 in an exhibition in Kilkenny, Ireland. This time, their partnership has resulted in more than ten sculptures that formally and symbolically articulate a diverse range of materials. However, they reveal the artists' "shared horizons" through sculptures that exist in a state of balance, in which all contributory sources are visible, transparent.

The artists playfully and harmoniously explore such issues as tension, strength, gravity, resistance, and the instability of materials. Colored polyamide stockings filled with plastic beeds are stretched, angled and tied to small circular wooden structures, with small colored spheres that punctuate fine steel wires and create miniscule areas of volume in a sequence of "tensorial relations". The fragility of the works gives the sensation that the slightest sudden movement could completely unbalance them. According to the artists themselves "each part is related to the next, thus generating vibrations of movements which are born from the form, are launched into space, and then return again to their original form like the myth of eternal recurrence"

For the artists, joint creation is "jazz", an "operation in uncertainty". The works only come together through the process of installing the exhibition, in which the organic and expansive forms of Neto's more traditional sculptures meet the simplicity and self-containment of form of Bevilacqua's work, and through this meeting discover a new poetic.
Ernesto Neto's impressive installation, Leviathan Thot is currently filling the Paris Pantheon. Bevilacqua showed work in November at the Casa Andrade e Murici in Curitiba.