“The exhibition in HangarBicocca – explains the curator Vicente Todolí – allows you to get to know in depth the physical, sensory and poetic aspect of the works of Cildo Meireles, which question and often overturn pre-established ideas and clichés. His art proposes perceptive and conceptual challenges through the mechanism of juxtaposition, accumulation and metaphor to achieve a complete poetic subversion. The artist uses the element of seduction to attract the visitor into the installations like a spider's web. And with a significant ironic and critical capacity he offers the possibility of experimenting with new thoughts and behaviors ”.
The itinerary inside Pirelli HangarBicocca unwinds through twelve works, eleven very large installations and a sculpture on a microscopic scale: it starts with a 9 mm cube of sacred wood and ends with the reproduction of a pier overlooking a sea of seventeen thousand books. Partially co-produced with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) and with the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Porto, Portugal), Cildo Meireles' solo show represents a unique opportunity to confront the lyrical gaze of this
extraordinary connoisseur of artistic languages, capable of restoring a vision of the world
heterogeneous and never predictable.
It is the tiny sculpture Cruzeiro do Sul (1969-1970) that provocatively opens the exhibition, in contrast with the large space and in dialogue with the other imposing installations: the work is a 9 millimeter cube in pine wood and oak, the sacred trees of the natives of America.
One of the most monumental and complex works, Através (1983-1989) consists of a large installation in which visitors find themselves walking on a floor of broken glass, encountering barriers, fences, bars and trellises along the way. The noise produced by footsteps and the visible limitations refer to the possibility of breaking down these and other barriers. As the artist clarified on the occasion of the retrospective at the Tate Modern in London in 2008: “You are metaphorically breaking every piece of debris, every prohibition and obstacle. The shattered glass creates a continuous metaphor for the gaze that
manages to go through everything” (Cildo Meireles, cat. Tate Modern, London, 2008).
The subversive poetics of Cildo Meireles returns in Babel (2001), a tower of radios tuned to different channels to form a highly evocative visual and sound environment. The work required a guardian to go beyond the visual to make room for the other senses. Within a fine mesh are dozens of seemingly identical rubber balls. The public, invited to touch them, discovers that their weight actually varies from one to another.
Atlas (2007) is a tribute to the work Base del Mondo by Piero Manzoni, and consists of a photograph mounted on a light box that portrays Meireles during a performance in Denmark (2007). The artist has himself photographed upside down on the same pedestal that Manzoni installed in 1961.
An expanse of bones (3 tons), American banknotes (6) and candles (70) form the work Olvido (1987-1989), exhibited for the first time in the project room of the MoMA in New York in 1990. Inside a large enclosure built with tens of thousands of white candles, the traditional tent of the Natives of North America, covered with money, stands out among the huge amount of bovine bones that give off a pungent smell.
Amerikkka (1991-2013) plays on the contrast between a floor of 22 wooden eggs and an overlying ceiling of 55 bullets. The spectator finds himself "walking on eggs", a linguistic metaphor to indicate a dangerous situation, accentuated by the presence of thousands of bullets pointing downwards which, as the walk progresses, approach menacingly.
Entrevendo (1970-1994) also constitutes an attempt to explore human perception in its totality. The visitor is invited to enter a structure of more than eight meters in the shape of a funnel at the end of which a hot air fan is placed. At the entrance he is offered two ice cubes to put in his mouth, one with a salty taste and the other with a sweet taste. As you approach the source of hot air, the ice melts giving substance to the phenomenon of synesthesia: the same sensory stimulation is therefore perceived as a dual experience, creating
estrangement.
Cinza (1984-1986) is made up of two different and contiguous rooms, one totally white, the other totally black, whose floors are respectively covered with pieces of chalk and charcoal. The movement of the public from one room to another tends to mix the colors together, contributing to the transformation of the work.
Also in the work Para Pedro (1984-1993), dedicated to the artist Pedro Ariel's son, Meireles creates an environment delimited by two oblique curtains, which in this case narrow at the end where five screens project different apparently indistinct textures. Also in this case, as in many works on display, the viewer can hear a sound, that of gravel being crushed.
Inside the rectangular structure of Abajur (1997-2010) there is a large luminous device which, rotating, shows the images of an ancient sailing ship plowing the sea, while the sound of flying seagulls hovers in the room. At a later stage, the spectator's gaze reveals the mechanism that makes the work move, consisting of some people who activate a dynamo which in turn makes the central pivot rotate.
The icon of the expanse of water as a boundless space is also proposed in Marulho (1991-1997) which consists in the reproduction of a long wooden jetty that overlooks a floor of 17 books with images of the sea. To attract the viewer's attention, different voices repeat the word "water" in various languages. The work is one of the most spectacular examples of the accumulation technique used by Meireles.
The artist
Known for being one of the pioneers of the international conceptual art movement, Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, 1948) has over time gone beyond the limits of any artistic trend. Experimenting with different thought strategies and techniques, he uses in his sculptures and installations a wide variety of objects and materials chosen for their symbolic meaning. He explores human perception in its entirety, addressing even dramatic universal themes such as dictatorship, colonialism, globalization and the repression of human rights. The raids have become famous
artistic works of the seventies that lived in those years as a real counter-information system in Brazil: on the glass of empty Coca-Cola bottles, destined to be filled and put up for sale, for example, critical messages were stamped in white paint of the military dictatorship. Similar writings were impressed with a system of stamps on the banknotes in circulation. Cildo Meireles was one of the first Brazilian artists to participate in an exhibition at the MoMA in New York (1970) and the first ever to have had a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern in London (2008). He has several participations in the most important exhibitions such as Documenta in Kassel (2002) and the Venice Biennale (2009).
The exhibition program of Pirelli HangarBicocca
The Cildo Meireles exhibition. Installations is part of the exhibition program designed by Vicente Todolí together with Andrea Lissoni. The exhibition project is presented in conjunction with the personal exhibition of Micol Assaël set up in the exhibition space of the "Shed" until 4 May 2014.
The Pirelli HangarBicocca calendar will continue with exhibitions by Pedro Paiva and João Maria Gusmão (June 2014), Joan Jonas (September 2014), Céline Condorelli (January 2015), Juan Muñoz (March 2015) and Damián Ortega (April 2015).
Pirelli Hangar Bicocca
HangarBicocca, Pirelli's space for contemporary art, is the natural continuation of a long tradition of attention to culture, research and innovation that has accompanied the company since its foundation over 140 years ago. Thanks to the commitment of Pirelli, HangarBicocca makes high-level programming and a series of activities for children and families accessible to the public, and has now become a point of reference for Greater Milan and for the international public.
