May 23 (Bloomberg) -- One moment it’s a pastel, sugar- dusted Candyland, full of excited children. Look again, and it’s a gossamer cathedral with quirky erotic dimensions.

Ernesto Neto’s “anthropodino,” commissioned with a $200,000 grant, is a memorably wondrous installation residing until June 14 inside the 55-thousand-square-foot drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

No longer used by the Seventh Regiment, the imposing castle-like fortress is now home to concerts, art fairs and other cultural events.

Neto, a 44-year-old Brazilian, created “anthropodino” just for this space, deploying 1,400 bones made of wood and hundreds of yards of tulle to create (without glue or nails) an environment that consists of a canopy and floor sculpture. It ranges in length from 122 feet to almost 200 feet, in width from 82 feet to 122 feet and rises nearly 70 feet. The project was designed and sewn in Rio de Janeiro over a two-month period, and then put together by a New York team in one nail-biting week.

Dangling from the ceiling are 43 Lycra stalactites, holding 1,650 pounds of clove, black pepper, cumin and ginger. They add a jellyfish aspect while perfuming the air.

This is the biggest project Neto has ever done and he looked upon it with obvious pleasure from a balcony of the drill hall. “I wept with pleasure a few times as it was going up,” he confessed.

‘The Human Body’

Neto likes watching the way people move through the piece, how they touch it, where they enter and exit.

“The human body is a continuum. If you think about the male sex and the female sex, they are the same thing,” Neto said. “One is the outside and the other is the inside.”

Similarly, from the outside “anthropodino” is masculine, but get inside, and it’s feminine, he said.

“My work is about life, about the spermatozoa and the ovum, about seeds, plants,” Neto added. “After all, we’re the fruit of sexual relationships, all of us, and it’s stupid we have to hide and pretend it’s not good.”

As a child, Neto aspired to be an astronaut, but ended up studying electrical engineering for a while, until a friend introduced him to clay. “When I made the first sculpture, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life,” he remembers. “Now I can’t live without creating things.”

Fragrance became part of his work when Neto entered an Arabian shop and became intoxicated with its aromas: “I felt stoned!” he said. Through trial and error he found a way to blend cumin, pepper and other spices into a subtle essence, adding floral notes of lavender and chamomile.

The unique scent of “anthropodino” will evolve over the course of the exhibition.

Faith in the Artist

Rebecca Robertson, president and chief executive of the Park Avenue Armory, saw a Neto installation for the first time in 2006 at the Pantheon in Paris. When it came time to choose the first artist in the Armory’s new annual commissioning program, Neto was at the top of the list.

“On this scale, you really need to have faith the artist doesn’t lose heart halfway through,” explains Robertson. “And you have to be sure the artist’s work is not being somehow distorted by the size but rather glorified by it.”

Born in Rio de Janeiro, where he still works, Neto says he loves the way the city flows naturally between mountain and beach, where the favelas, or shanty towns, look like foam to him as they climb the hillsides.

“My work also reflects the duality between nature and civilization, the geography of limits,” he notes. “It’s a valorization of joy, of daily life.”

He likes the easy intimacy of the people in Rio. Each New Year’s Eve, he throws a giant beach party, everyone invited.

Any Buyers?

“We barbecue, we drink beer, and there are no distinctions among us,” he says. “At 7 a.m. last year, a homeless person was taking care of the barbecue, carving and giving meat to the stragglers.”

As he looks out over “anthropodino,” due to come down soon, Neto wishes a “crazed collector” would buy the sculpture and build the perfect place to show it: “For himself, his family, his city, his country, for the planet Earth!”

The Drill Hall Commission was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, Booth Ferris Foundation, G-Star Raw, The Lauder Foundation/Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund, Kenneth Kuchin, Petrobras, and the Consulate General of Brazil in New York.

“Anthropodino” is on view until June 14 at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave. at 67th Street. Information: +1- 212-616-3930; http://www.armoryonpark.org.

(Zinta Lundborg is a writer for Bloomberg News. Any opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Zinta Lundborg in New York zlundborg@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 23, 2009 00:01 EDT