Page 115 - ARTE!Brasileiros #49

IN CILDO MEIRELES’S VAST AND DIVERSE WORK, if there is construction, there is also a consequence not only of the choice of works that dialogue with “absolutely unresolved
deconstruction; if there is reality, there is illusion; if there is visibility, there is what issues”, but “the result of a very complex and forceful production, of Cildo’s ability to
is hidden; if there is reason, there is madness; if there is affection, there is trauma; manage affections rather than responding to specific events. He is responding to a
if there are affirmations, there is the mystery; if there is order, it can itself generate feeling that was shared in another moment and is still shared today”. And this does not
chaos; if there is formalism, there is abstraction; where there is a way, there is the refer only to Brazilian history. Among the works that deal with the colonial structure
deviation; in the circuit, short circuit; if there is vastness, there is also the ghetto; are also Olvido (1987-1989), in which thousands of candles and ox bones surround an
if there is version, there is subversion; if there is balance, he is tense; and if there Indian-style tent - lined with money notes, and Amérikkka (1991/2013). Referring already
is violence, there is resistance. It is not necessarily about oppositions, much less to the title of the far-right terrorist and supremacist organization Ku Klux Klan, the
incompatibilities, but about realizing that in the carioca artist’s striking production installation creates a tense atmosphere by placing the public on wooden eggs, on the
there are no easy and unique truths, and that the obvious and most usual ways are floor, and targeted by gunfire projectiles attached to the ceiling.
always being challenged - things are not always what they seem. Like Amérikka, the show features a series of other works that have never been
Thus, those who visit Entrevendo, at Sesc Pompeia, one of the greatest exhibitions exhibited in Brazil, or that have only been presented in the country for a long time.
ever held by Cildo Meireles, 71, will come across paradoxes, ambiguities, ironies, According to Rebouças, at least two generations have not had contact with a wide
contrasts and concerns that run through the 150 works of the exhibition, curated by cut of Cildo’s work, since the artist’s last major exhibition in Brazil toured the Rio de
Julia Rebouças and Diego Matos. In works in various supports, languages and scales, Janeiro and São Paulo MAM in 2000. Little interest in setting up exhibitions - at least

scattered throughout the vast spaces designed by Lina Bo Bardi, the arprojetist today - Cildo says that one of the reasons that attracted him in the proposal was the
presents a production that activates, expands and shuffles the senses, as Rebouças location of the show at Sesc Pompeia, where there is a large circulation of people of

explains. “It is a ct that deals with the idea of meaning from its multiple definitions. all classes and ages and free admission. “This characteristic of Sesc, which is a deep
Thinking not only of these perceptual capacities linked to touch, hearing, sight, smell, respect and interaction with the surroundings, with the community, also brings an
etc., but also thinking of sense as a measure, as direction, as balance, as a sense. audience that is not specialized, specific to the fine arts. And this expansion interested
And it is very important to understand that in Cildo’s work these forms of perception me”, he points out.
of the world are affirming themselves, but they are also contradicting each other,
challenging each other”, she says. PARALLELS WITH THE DICTATORSHIP
Entrevendo, the work that names the exhibition, proposes that the public put two ice It is not only between the present day and colonial history that Entrevendo draws
stones, one sweet and one salty, into a large cylindrical installation and walk towards a parallels. A strong performer during the years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985),
hot air source. The work, designed in 1970 and first performed in 1994, triggers different Cildo is emphatic in denouncing the abuses of the current federal government and the
sensations and forms of understanding in the visitor’s own body as it deals with the similarities with the military period. “But the current one is even more sinister and
contrasts between sweet and salty, hot and cold, light and dark. “And interestingly, it more ridiculous because it is paradigmatic ingenuity”, he says. The repetition of the
is a job that requires very little vision. The idea that vision is the primordial sense of history in the deaths of journalist Vladimir Herzog in 1975 and Councilwoman Marielle
artistic experience is very much challenged in Cildo’s work”, says Rebouças. The artist Franco in 2018, both fruits of political persecution, appears in the famous Insertions in
agrees: “At the beginning of the last century, Marcel Duchamp was already talking Ideological Circuits, a series started by the artist in 1970 and developed to this day. .
about the intention of liberating art only from retinal rule. Here in Brazil, since the 50s, By stamping, during the dictatorship, cruise bills with the question “Who killed Herzog?”
especially since neoconcretism, this has become a very important thing. Exercising and, nowadays, real notes with Marielle’s face, Cildo proposes to rotate symbols, social
this multi-sensoriality has become a specificity of Brazilian production based on Lygia criticisms or slogans on objects of the everyday life (the project began with returnable
Clark’s Oiticica... And some of my works also deal with it”. Coca-Cola bottles), creating a kind of counter-information network in pre-existing
The contrasts, ambiguities, paradoxes or subversions, which are also invitations circuits. As the artist himself explains, the Insertions have the ability to give a “voice to
to the imagination, are notable in other works that sometimes make explicit these the individual in the face of the macrostructure”, in addition to raising questions about
characteristics in their own titles. In Blind Mirror (1970), made of a gray and misshapen artistic authorship and the place of the artwork, outside of specialized environments.
mass without reflection; Descala (2003), with dysfunctional stairs; Virtual Volumes Although resistant to any framing of his work as “engaged art” - “I have disgust for
(1968-969), in drawings that present volumes without physicality; Invisible Sphere pamphleteering art”, he said once said - Cildo is not afraid to highlight the political
(2012), with an aluminum box that, when opened, suggests a sphere due to the internal concern present in his work. And tell how it came about. “It was in 1969 that I felt
absence of material; Obscura Luz (1982), in which a shadow forms the design of a lamp; compelled to deal even more strongly with political issues”, he says about the year he
in the series of zero notes or coins, which question the relationship between real and participated in a show where the Brazilian representation for the Paris Biennial Youth
symbolic value and explain that the value stamped on money is an abstraction; or in would be selected. “Three hours before the inauguration, with the exhibition already
works such as The Shortest Distance Between Two Points is a Curve (1976) and in the set up, DOPS agents surrounded the Rio MAM building and demanded the cancellation
works of the Physical Art series (1969). of the exhibition. There was even the beginning of a military police inquiry involving all
The Blindhotland series, in turn, with three works on display, confuses the visitor when his the artists. And I, who in that exhibition had formal works, without political nature, from
vision is “betrayed” by the appearance of the objects. In the famous Eureka / Blindhotland then on I felt almost obliged to refer to these political issues in my work”, he recalls.
(1970-1975), for example, dozens of balls of the same size, color and shape - scattered for Relating the current context and the dictatorial period, the artist is outraged by
manipulation by the public - have significantly different weights; In Blindhotland / Ghetto, recent episodes of censorship and the kind of treatment culture has received from
otherwise, balls of different sizes have the same weight, again creating a kind of cognitive the government. “We’re witnessing this kind of thing, an idiot like this guy who was
confusion that defies the senses. Like them, several other works of the exhibition invite from Funarte (the current secretary of culture Roberto Alvim) has come to the public
the visitor to interaction, to an experience that comes through participation, dialoguing to say that Fernanda Montenegro is nasty and liar. She, who is a kind of national
with what Cildo calls the “seductive character” of the visual arts. treasure. And some guy comes and thinks he can defecate in public. This has become
“I think it has two characteristics that the fine arts should preserve, two aspects the hallmark of this government”. And he concludes: “But there is a physics law that
that should never be overlooked. First is the character of seduction. I think in a way says that every compression corresponds to an explosion. So the more you squeeze
conceptual art at first tried to clean it up, make it aseptic, and you lose your chance something, the more it will provoke a reaction, that’s a basic thing”.
to deal with the seduction content a job might have”, says the artist. “And the other
thing is that the fine arts is an activity that allows every new idea to start from scratch.
You want to make a movie, you can have a thousand ideas and ways, but that without EXHIBITIONS SÃO PAULO | PAGE 56 TO 59
pre ends in the frame. In fine arts there is no such thing, you can take anything of any
kind with any material using any procedure, and you get to the final work”, he says, THE FIRST LEONILSON
also explaining that he never had a definite method of production.
POETIC AND POLITICAL VEIN COLLECTION BY ANTONIO DIAS, WITH 38 WORKS, SHEDS LIGHT ON THE EARLY

Both seduction and the variety of materials and languages are also present in works that YEARS OF THE ARTIST FROM CEARÁ, ESPECIALLY IN WORKS SOLD IN EUROPE,
deal more explicitly with socio-political and economic issues, and deal with memories
that are repeated in Brazilian history. In Mission / Missions (How to Build Cathedrals), IS IN A SHOW AT PINAKOTHEKE, NOW IN SÃO PAULO
thousands of coins scattered across the floor connect, through a column of stacked
wafers, to the bones hanging from the ceiling, creating an “anti-cathedral” that BY FABIO CYPRIANO, IN RIO DE JANEIRO
denounces the violence of colonial exploitation and its thirst for financial accumulation.
“Indigenous extermination, this truculent history, this is a question that persists over IT WAS IN THE LATE 1970S THAT TWO ART STUDENTS, upon entering a gallery, realized that
time. When I did this work in 1987, thinking of the Seven Mission Peoples of the 17th art is not just about creation. “What caught our attention the most was the price of
century, I was speaking generically about this process of annihilation. But it ends up labor. It was a totally unrealistic business, the reality of Brazil at that time. It is not
falling like a glove to the current situation”, says the artist, without losing, however, possible, it does not cost that, it must be wrong!”, says Luiz Zerbini, today ironically
the hope that there may still be justice. “But sooner or later the responsibility for one of the most expensive Brazilian artists, remembering his visit with José Leonilson
these crimes will fall on the perpetrators”. to an Antonio Dias show (1944-2018).
The feeling of contemporaneity that runs through the exhibition, according to Rebouças, is The statement, however, serves as a preamble to the friendship that would eventually

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