CILDO MEIRELES: desenhos, 1964-1977: Texto crítico [Critical essay]: Diego Matos

Cildo Meireles:

Space and Time, Drawing and Memory

Diego Matos

And off you go, into the wide world

Making friends, chasing victories

Instead of hanging around on street corners, whispering

Spinning stories[1]

Drawing as a fold towards the world

Drawing is the fabric of Cildo Meireles' (Rio de Janeiro, 1948) memory. Everything the artist reflects from the world seems to be mirrored in his drawings. They have been created in hotel rooms during the stillness of the night, in art classes in Brasília, in quiet mornings at various places he has lived across the country, and in the studio during breaks from work.

Throughout his career, the artist has noted, scribbled, speculated, composed, designed, created situations, identified objects, narrated, and framed both real and dreamlike scenes. Consequently, this speculative field of drawing has become both material and subject for other self-contained works and projects. A foundational figure in Brazilian art and a key name in conceptual and installation art, Cildo Meireles is, in fact, a practitioner of gestures that come from the hand. While he has never been inclined towards discourse or written word—except when he felt they were absolutely necessary—the stroke, doodle, or mark on paper remains his primary means of communication. The artist often refers to drawing as a kind of “graphic intoxication,”[2] something of the order of the inexplicable.

Presenting the public with a generous selection of Meireles’ drawings makes visible and accessible the artist’s most prominent practice throughout his over 60-year career. This practice is inseparable from his three-dimensional work. His drawings reveal much of the poetic and conceptual repertoire he has developed since the beginning of his career. Thus, exhibiting these drawings auspiciously unveils certain truths about the artist's intimacy, which has also led to the inclusion of the epigraph extracted from the lyrics of Jorge Ben, a musician who has always been present in Meireles’ routine. Further insights into this relationship will be explored shortly.

It is important to view drawing as a potential key to the various themes and contributions of Meireles’ monumental body of work. Through diverse paths and missteps over time, the artist has interwoven a vast array of concepts, signs, forms, and representations that have shaped his artistic cosmos.

If the act of drawing represents one of the artist’s moments of greatest intimacy and solitude, it is also where the issues that most illuminate his art are revealed—an act of significant honesty. Thus, examining this material allows us to glimpse a space that is simultaneously inside and outside: repulsive and attractive, ironic and literal, precise and indirect, erotic and violent, visceral and rational. Each of these elements weaves threads of meaning into the thousands of drawings the artist has produced over the years.

In this context, it is relevant to reference what Frederico Morais—the longest-standing critic of Meireles’ career—observed: broadly speaking, Meireles’ work can be viewed as drawing. The language of drawing, in all its scope, is the foundational element of his practice. It materially records the memories he shares with all of us. More than the works created over nearly six decades, the artist considers his own memory (and his awareness of existence) to be his most precious asset; from it arises his artistic becoming. Losing it would be the most perverse way to confront finitude. According to Meireles himself, as he noted in an interview over ten years ago, “memory is the greatest of all realities.” Drawing, in turn, is the material element that records it, presents it to the world, and becomes a catalyst for ideas.

In general, the marks on paper represent a project or illustrate the landscape of a dream. The colors might evoke the history of artistic visual conventions, but they can also reflect the colors of a specific place. Essentially, they capture almost everything etched into memory, with their translation being art itself.

Next, I would like to highlight the two oldest drawings featured in this exhibition: one from 1964 and the other from 1965. Both serve as keys to the artist’s early conceptual formulations, bringing a poetic interpretation of African masks to the surface of the paper. These masks had a profound impact on the artist when he visited an exhibition at Centro de Artes at Universidade de Brasília (UnB), which displayed works from the University of Dakar’s collection in 1963. Using visceral ink strokes, he freely reimagined the forms of these corporeal objects, incorporating elements related to the local environment. As is known, Cildo spent his formative years in Brasília before moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1967.

In the newly founded Brazilian capital, he had the opportunity to study with the Peruvian artist Felix Barrenechea (1921-2013) at Fundação Cultural do Distrito Federal in the 1960s. Unfortunately, due to the military coup, the experimental art course offered there was discontinued. Nonetheless, this intense interaction led the artist to develop a disciplined practice, particularly through drawing, which would pave his professional path. It was there that he learned to capture the strength of the ink stroke in depicting expressive faces and figures.

Additionally, note that these strokes represent soldiers, with faces outlined and marked by the distinctive helmet of a low-ranking military figure in a situation of conflict. These figures became more prevalent on the streets of Brasília, which was under siege by the repressive apparatus following the coup and the establishment of the dictatorship in 1964. Thus, there is a shift from something initially fascinating to a more desperate and frightening appearance. In the 1965 drawing, observe the erasures and fragments of text containing commanding words, reflecting a textual expression of tension and violence. Moreover, red subtly appears for the first time in the artist’s pictorial field: notice the reddened eyes of these figures, painted with Merthiolate—a cheaper pigment that provided the imprecision of color the artist desired. This early use of red would later become a significant feature of his practice.

This marks the emergence of the idea of using red as a point of emphasis in his work—something that becomes increasingly prominent in three drawings from 1967, where the color begins to assume a more central role. In these pieces, we see dizzying movements with shifting planes, alternations between the outside and the inside (a recurring theme throughout his graphic work), transformations between body and beast, and situations of imminent conflict characteristic of vibrant cities like the besieged Brasília and Rio de Janeiro in the late 1960s. At the same time, there is a striking presence of the artist’s dreamlike universe, including representations or metaphors that may have been influenced by the fantastic realism of Jorge Luis Borges or the beatnik eroticism of Henry Miller—writers who are among Meireles' most widely read.

Alongside this, the notion of surveillance seems to haunt these works, which is natural for someone whose imagination was shaped by state violence, persecution, repression, and the militarization of life starting in 1964—the first year of the most enduring civil-military dictatorship in Latin America. In many of the presented drawings, we notice the disturbing presence of a figure wearing glasses or a hat, suggesting that the experience of persecution is one of the nightmares of his generation—a kind of fear of discovery or the unknown. This, in turn, led the artist to pursue a radical path of conceptual and material experimentation with a rare refinement of language, connecting him generationally to various artists in Brazil.

In the historiography of Brazilian art, much has been said about his generation—the “tranca-ruas” [lock the streets] generation, the guerrilla art group, the counter-art movement, and the AI-5 generation.[3] Cildo Meireles was closely linked to a specific path in Brazilian art, shared with figures such as Thereza Simões, Alfredo Fontes, Sérgio Augusto Porto, Luiz Alphonsus, Umberto Costa Barros, Guilherme Vaz, Cláudio Paiva, Raymundo Collares, and Wanda Pimentel. Some of these artists—recognized as the Grupo de Brasília (for having lived there or studied at UnB)—sought an intellectual and material foundation for art, exploring the expansion of plastic scale, ephemeral situations and actions, and urban and environmental issues, even as they were influenced by new figuration.

More broadly, this generational output represents a movement from the particular to the general, from the intimate to the public sphere, and vice versa. This poetic transition is subtly conveyed in Meireles' drawings. At the same time, his objects—created concurrently—suggest statements that establish a dichotomous relationship between title and work, and work and title.

Ironically, most of his drawings are untitled. However, over time, various thematic groups, moments, and projects have received nicknames and designations that identify them. Throughout this exhibition, we recognize some of these groups: African masks and soldiers, street and corner scenes, figurations of room corners with different color combinations, cinema and comic storyboards, fingerprint impressions forming territories, more geometric color fields, and the Brasília series, where a red sky and earth intersect with white, along with mixed-media depictions of bodies.

In fact, it was in the early months of 1967, even before the drawings of street corners and room corners, that the artist held his first institutional show: the exhibition Desenho [Drawing] at Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, which opened on February 2, the day of Iemanjá. Cildo traveled to Salvador at the invitation of Mário Cravo Jr., a Bahia-based artist and cultural organizer who had seen his work and was impressed. Mário wrote in the exhibition brochure: “It was a surprise for us to find in some of his works the presence of a theme linked to Afro-Bahian mythology.”[4]

Since he did not yet have a permanent home after leaving Brasília, Meireles stayed in Salvador, enjoying a period of hospitality at the museum, where he developed a series of additional drawings. The room he occupied is now the director’s office at the institution. In a sense, being in Salvador allowed his earlier poetic imagination to encounter a cultural reality that was still unfamiliar to him in terms of lived experience. As we delve deeper into the enigmatic narratives of Cildo Meireles, we discover his personal stories and the situations he lived through. To know Meireles is to experience his expansive prose, which draws us into the anecdotes underlying each of his works.

The outside of the inside, the inside of the outside

While still a young artist studying under Barrenechea in the Brazilian capital, Meireles was also developing a fascination with cinema, a medium through which he could explore his passion for storytelling. During his time at Ciem, an experimental high school within Universidade de Brasília, he had the opportunity to attend courses with Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes and Jean-Claude Bernardet. Unsurprisingly, this love for cinema led him to consider a career in the field, writing scripts with friends and even building stage sets for performances.

With that in mind, it is important to closely examine the drawings he produced between 1965 and 1968 before delving into the more refined and analytical constructions of his Espaços virtuais: cantos [Virtual Spaces: Corners] (1967-1968), a remarkable series of project designs and installation structures that emulate the corners of a Brazilian house, distorting the precision of these spaces through a play on Euclidean and descriptive geometry. By this time, after his period in Bahia, Meireles had settled in Paraty, on the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro, where his project designs began to take shape as material objects and installations.

Before arriving at the drawings on graph paper that are part of this series, along with its counterparts, Ocupações [Occupations] (1968–1969) and Volumes virtuais [Virtual Volumes] (1968–1969), the artist underwent a process of refining his drawings, stripping the situation down to its essence to reach the core of the language, mathematics, and geometry of the conceived and constructed phenomenon. On this visual journey, he created drawings where the language of storyboards crossed into the realm of technical, almost architectural drawing. This path of representation ultimately led to the spatial and environmental reordering of his “virtual spaces.”

Three of these 1967 drawings are featured in this exhibition, along with others that display a fantastical transition towards the pictorial layering of planes, resembling either the corner of a house or the corner of two streets. As critic Frederico Morais noted in his essay Cildo Meireles: algum desenho: “The corner inside a house is a place of refuge and solitude, a space protected by stillness and abandonment. The street corner, by contrast, is a place of action, conflict, and the unexpected.”[5]

The artist boldly blurs the line between two realities—two places merged in dreams and memory: the intimate, contained personal space and the external space, which is the place of encounters, potential conflict, and insecurity. Even after a few years’ pause at the turn of 1970s, the representation of this intersection reappeared in the artist’s practice. In this exhibition, three colorful drawings from 1973 stand out for capturing many of the spatial concerns discussed here, including the presence of an enigmatic figure that seems to blend with household objects while also suggesting a movement toward the most private corners of the space.

After four years without fully engaging with drawing, Meireles returned to the representation of spatiality. At this stage, he began to construct enclosed spatial structures, marked by an uncommon pictorial gesture in his work: the use of his fingerprints, evoking territories or even animal skins. This new sense of physicality is enhanced by the occasional use of assemblage on the drawing's surface, incorporating plasters—everyday items as familiar in Brazilian households as Merthiolate or aspirin.

However, even with this symbiotic merging of pictorial surface and skin, the artist retained a keen interest in urban representation. Upon returning to Brasília in 1977, Meireles created a series of drawings that uniquely capture the vastness of the city, juxtaposed with the suffocating panoptic control of the military regime. In these works, there is an almost visceral encounter between the expansive blue sky of the central plateau, which seems to engulf us, and the red earth, which appears eager to cover and contaminate us. Between these two entities stands the modern, grey-and-white architecture that blinds us. Notice, too, an element that creates a reflective connection to the location: the city’s distinctive streetlights, which provide a sense of space and time as we navigate Lúcio Costa’s Plano Piloto [Master Plan]. This brings us to the symbolic end of the journey, from interior to exterior, from dream to reality, returning to the place where it all began.[6]

As Aracy Amaral noted during the 1978 exhibition of the artist's drawings at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, “being, experimentation, and drawing alternately, and with varying emphasis, compose the artistic personality of Cildo Meireles.” [7] This echoed Mário Cravo Jr.’s observations from more than a decade earlier, when he met the artist and encountered his pictographic universe, describing it as “a powerful, tragic, perhaps even terrifying world.”

Reflecting on the 1970s, one of the fortunate coincidences in Brazilian cultural history was the rich potential for interaction and influence among different artists’ works. At same time when Meireles was developing the conceptual principles of his object-based and installation art—while also continuing his daily drawing practice—Jorge Ben was presenting to the public the prelude to his celebrated mystical trilogy, which included A Tábua de Esmeralda (1974), Solta o Pavão (1975), and África Brasil (1976).

This prelude was the seminal album Ben (1972), a poetic work that masterfully signals the arrival of the Jorge Ben’s creative peak. Even the white cover, featuring the artist seated in profile and making his presence felt, seems to announce a new artistic gesture. The great charm of Jorge Ben’s music lies in his ability to refine the unexpected, transforming colloquial speech into rhythmic and melodic poetry. While there is no confined field of operation, there is an intuitive construction of meaning—this same intuition is evident in Meireles’ work, from his graphic intoxication and conceptual formulations to his subverted object and sensory installations. Despite their interest in enigma and the magical, both artists have a strong sense of responsibility and a deep engagement with the reality they inhabit.

Cildo Meireles and Jorge Ben move through the world, promoting gestures of seduction that capture not only sight or sound but also evoke a synesthetic experience through the disruption of the senses. We must remain open to the unexpected “instead of hanging around on street corners, whispering and spinning stories.” In this sense, risk—whether manifested as the drawn line or the potential for failure or danger—should be understood as a statement.[8]  

I now suggest taking some time to consider the work Para ser curvada com os olhos[To Be Bent with the Eyes] (1970-1975), a piece devised to be presented as the entrance or prelude to all his exhibitions. It is an open door to the subversion of the senses, the loss of control into which the artist invites us. Inside a box, there are two iron bars: one straight and one curved. Opposite them is a plaque inscribed with the words, “two identical curved bars.” The contradiction between the objects and the statement, combined with the instructive title, immediately sets in motion an intuitive game of deceiving the eye. This work inaugurates a series that challenges the primacy of vision as the dominant mode of perceiving art, known as Blindhotland. It is this same misleading perception of sight that pushes us to create political-poetic images from the untitled drawings. For Cildo Meireles, this “perhaps terrifying world” is also perhaps a tragicomic or dreamlike world in which risk does not seem to trouble him.