Cildo Meireles, Uma e algumas cadeiras / Camuflagens, 2024, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, installation view
2025. Cildo Meireles
Uma e algumas cadeiras / Camuflagens
Review published in Artforum about the solo show in São Paulo
WEB
Review published in Artforum about the solo show in São Paulo
WEB
Significantly and subversively linguistic as ever, Cildo Meireles in his exhibition “Uma e algumas cadeiras / Camuflagens” (One and Some Chairs / Camouflages) was concerned with questioning familiar representational conventions. The show presented to Brazilian viewers sculptures and paintings already exhibited in New York a year ago—projects conceived in the 1980s and ’90s but not developed until Meireles dived into them while exploring his archives during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
One and Seven Chairs, conceived in 1997 but materialized in 2023, is a humorous tribute to fellow artist Joseph Kosuth and his historic Conceptual installation One and Three Chairs, 1965. Meireles’s takeoff begins with a simple wooden chair standing as the faithful materialization of the pure sign, followed by six other mnemonic and formal experiments that question this archetype: Along with the primordial chair, we see a robust solid made of stacked wooden panels from which (we are told) the form of the chair has been excised. It’s a cognitive game: We must understand a sign through its invisibility and imagine a chair-shaped negative space inside the wooden tower. Then, by presenting the chair’s wooden volume milled into sawdust and burned into ashes inside two transparent acrylic boxes, the artist argues that the object’s reality is not graspable through its recognizability or materiality. Nor can it be completely signified through an exhaustive accumulation of its representational records: Meireles has painted the cross sections of the chair on 1,100 stacked canvas sheets and silk-screened its profile on 110 glass plates presented in a pile—the latter holding a strong remembrance of Robert Smithson’s Glass Stratum, 1967. Extending Kosuth’s formal and semiological demonstration, Meireles wants to show the mnemonic persistence of symbols; a carbonized version of the primordial chair attests to our solid memory of it even on the verge of its formal annihilation or semantic emptiness.
As an appendix or a formal commentary, Meireles obliquely placed an eighth solid in front of the lined towers. The untitled 2023 work plays with the duality of invisibility: The artist removes the volume of the chair from a volume composed of stacked acrylic plates. Here, the cut in the acrylic creates a visible image of the chair in the transparent material. The heuristic investigation of the conventions of representing an object resonate in Épura – Cadeira 1 (Épura – Chair 1), 2022. The title refers to the geometric representation of a volume in a planar projection; the artist has painted orthogonal projections of the top, front, and side of the same chair on three square canvases, one placed on the floor and the other two meeting in a corner, restoring the object’s two-dimensional depiction to a schematic three-dimensionality.
In a second room, Meireles exhibited works from the “Camouflages” series, 1987–2023: beach chairs, umbrellas, tents, a fisherman’s stool, and a stretcher, vividly colored with acrylic paint. Adding material and symbolic layers to everyday objects, the artist removed their usual functionalities while satirically camouflaging them as artworks. Once again paying homage to fellow artists, Meireles subtitled these pieces with the name of the artist he’s referenced in painting the item, as in Cadeira de praia (Jasper Johns) (Beach Chair [Jasper Johns]), 1987–2023, where he’s used colors he considers characteristic of Johns’s works, painting them in stripes that repeat the geometric pattern of the beach chair’s nylon fabric. In Banco de pescador (Alfredo Volpi) (Fisherman’s Stool [Alfredo Volpi]), 1987–2023, he pays homage to one of Brazil’s leading modernists with the colors of the country’s flag. In works dedicated to Kazimir Malevich, Meireles chooses a paint-handling technique that emphasizes the superposition of layers of the same color—in this case, white on white in one work and black on black in another. Through metonymy, Meireles not only honors the works of these painters but also the importance they played in establishing painting as a platform essential to the history of modern art.
Text originally published at Artforum, vol. 63, no. 5, January 2025
One and Seven Chairs, conceived in 1997 but materialized in 2023, is a humorous tribute to fellow artist Joseph Kosuth and his historic Conceptual installation One and Three Chairs, 1965. Meireles’s takeoff begins with a simple wooden chair standing as the faithful materialization of the pure sign, followed by six other mnemonic and formal experiments that question this archetype: Along with the primordial chair, we see a robust solid made of stacked wooden panels from which (we are told) the form of the chair has been excised. It’s a cognitive game: We must understand a sign through its invisibility and imagine a chair-shaped negative space inside the wooden tower. Then, by presenting the chair’s wooden volume milled into sawdust and burned into ashes inside two transparent acrylic boxes, the artist argues that the object’s reality is not graspable through its recognizability or materiality. Nor can it be completely signified through an exhaustive accumulation of its representational records: Meireles has painted the cross sections of the chair on 1,100 stacked canvas sheets and silk-screened its profile on 110 glass plates presented in a pile—the latter holding a strong remembrance of Robert Smithson’s Glass Stratum, 1967. Extending Kosuth’s formal and semiological demonstration, Meireles wants to show the mnemonic persistence of symbols; a carbonized version of the primordial chair attests to our solid memory of it even on the verge of its formal annihilation or semantic emptiness.
As an appendix or a formal commentary, Meireles obliquely placed an eighth solid in front of the lined towers. The untitled 2023 work plays with the duality of invisibility: The artist removes the volume of the chair from a volume composed of stacked acrylic plates. Here, the cut in the acrylic creates a visible image of the chair in the transparent material. The heuristic investigation of the conventions of representing an object resonate in Épura – Cadeira 1 (Épura – Chair 1), 2022. The title refers to the geometric representation of a volume in a planar projection; the artist has painted orthogonal projections of the top, front, and side of the same chair on three square canvases, one placed on the floor and the other two meeting in a corner, restoring the object’s two-dimensional depiction to a schematic three-dimensionality.
In a second room, Meireles exhibited works from the “Camouflages” series, 1987–2023: beach chairs, umbrellas, tents, a fisherman’s stool, and a stretcher, vividly colored with acrylic paint. Adding material and symbolic layers to everyday objects, the artist removed their usual functionalities while satirically camouflaging them as artworks. Once again paying homage to fellow artists, Meireles subtitled these pieces with the name of the artist he’s referenced in painting the item, as in Cadeira de praia (Jasper Johns) (Beach Chair [Jasper Johns]), 1987–2023, where he’s used colors he considers characteristic of Johns’s works, painting them in stripes that repeat the geometric pattern of the beach chair’s nylon fabric. In Banco de pescador (Alfredo Volpi) (Fisherman’s Stool [Alfredo Volpi]), 1987–2023, he pays homage to one of Brazil’s leading modernists with the colors of the country’s flag. In works dedicated to Kazimir Malevich, Meireles chooses a paint-handling technique that emphasizes the superposition of layers of the same color—in this case, white on white in one work and black on black in another. Through metonymy, Meireles not only honors the works of these painters but also the importance they played in establishing painting as a platform essential to the history of modern art.
Text originally published at Artforum, vol. 63, no. 5, January 2025
Cildo Meireles, Uma e algumas cadeiras / Camuflagens, 2024, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, installation view
Cildo Meireles, Uma e algumas cadeiras / Camuflagens, 2024, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, installation view
Cildo Meireles, Uma e algumas cadeiras / Camuflagens, 2024, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, installation view