Cildo Meireles
May 24–September 29, 2013
Palacio de Velázquez
Parque del Retiro
Madrid
Organised by Museo Reina Sofía in
collaboration with Fundação Serralves, Porto
and HangarBicocca, Milan
Curator: João Fernandes
Since the end of the 1960s Cildo Meireles (b. 1948, Rio de Janeiro) has been developing new possibilities for the redefinition of conceptual art, based on a relationship with the viewer’s sensorial experience, the critical use of ideological and economic circulation systems, and also an ethical connection with the world, which are the foundations of the artist’s ongoing critical interpretation. Meireles’s art broadens the field of the critique of modernism made in Brazil and Latin America by artists such as Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape in the second half of the 20th century.
The exhibition includes some works and installations never before presented, and others that are among the artist’s lesser-known creations. As seen in installations such as Abajur, Olvido and Amerikkka, many of the pieces on display put forward a critical commentary on the concept of territory, questioning history, which is understood to be a narrative of colonial domination of the world. The exhibition also has some of Cildo Meireles’s historical series that examine the ideas of value, the art object and—again—territory, such as Physical Art and Insertions into Ideological Circuits.
The work of Meireles invites visitors to enter atmospheres that are particularly rich in their conditions regarding the perception of time and space, and they bring visitors face to face with the dematerialization of the art object and with a semantic reinvention of linguistic categories and of the categories of perceptual realities. The well-known series “Corners: Virtual Spaces” and “Virtual Volumes” are examples of a very personal redefinition of the languages of abstraction. Synesthesia is another one of the constructive devices found in the artist’s universe; different sensorial perceptions associate and coincide with one another in numerous works, from the association of the sound plane with the visual plane, or the association of vision with thermal or taste perceptions, as in Entrevendo. Meireles thus expands the possibilities of art as a human experience of the world.
