I remember that on my first visit to Ernesto Neto's studio (which at that time seemed to be in an indistinct neighborhood in the center of Rio de Janeiro) I could not see in his work, which practically packed the place, any direct reference to the human body. The location itself suggested a laboratory for experiments in physics where work was being done on systems of metastable equilibrium, and the cluttered office smacked of an eccentric art lover in whose library Rubens sat next to Alejaidinho. I vaguely remember having discussed with Neto what for me at that time had become evident: that contemporary Brazilian art, or at least a determined sector of it, was being formed as a powerful rereading of the modern European tradition. The sculptures and drawings on which Neto worked at that time were the perfect excuse for this type of reconstitution or re-interpretation: tubular polyester forms (women's stockings) filled with small lead balls, structured after the composition of complex systems of tensility whose end seemed to be that of actualizing precarious situations of balance. I even think I reproached Neto that same day for the apparent asceticism in his work, imagining it as being excessively faithful to what I saw as an extremely purist line in Brazilian sculpture which seemed rather loyal to a certain European modernity. He did not take long to retort sharply. According to Neto, balance was perhaps the most important of all the daily experiences for a native of Rio de Janeiro, a city in permanent danger, interposed between a marvelously abrupt geography and unpredictable socio-economic means. I thought I understood that the word "experience" was being used in the full complexity of its many uses: cultural experience and affective experience, that is, apprehension mediated by the apparently infinite system of representations, and personal experience, the encounter or search for the unrepresentable. Neto told me that the physics of his structures was a semantics, that his quest for impossible tensions was a material exploration of the ever-hazy operative of desire. Like desire, his work strove to be fragile, ephemeral, deceitfully pretty, everlasting. It occurred to me then that Neto's work corresponded to an entire genealogy of Brazilian artists who had formed a modern esthetics inseparable from an ethics of the body, from an exploration of the psychological and social dimensions of artistic work. A genealogy that would embrace names like Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and later, Antonio Dias, Tunga and Cildo Meireles. There were no doubts about the erotic intentionality of Neto's work: the pieces, subtly interactive, lent themselves to being manipulated. The artist's labor was projected in the game of the viewer, both saturated in references to skin, to sensuality, to tactile and visual pleasures. On the other hand it was a question of a curious, strange, pilgrim-like Eros, independent of any association too closely linked to a single meaning that an over-literal reference could come to impose on the work. And the thesis: unstable balance as desire, desire ambiguously literalized through tensions and resistances, was verified in large-scale sculptures as well as in delicate drawings, in "copulas" as well as in "colonies." From one stage to another a single consonance of materials and inventiveness was giving the impression of a continuous process of experimentation.