Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1948) is one of the greatest exponents of Brazilian art. Belonging to a generation that inherited the neo-concrete movement (Brazil), he was one of the instigators of conceptual art. Since the late-1960s, the artist has been developing work with a singular potential to test the semantic and ideological constructions that permeate the world.

Despite having spent his teenage years in Brasilia, in years dominated by a developmentalist utopia, and having started his artistic practice in the first decade of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Cildo Meireles maintained a distinctive ability to subvert the political through the poetic. In a characteristic gestural synthesis, the artist appropriates and transforms materials, objects and everyday situations in works that bring together critical awareness, poetic vision and the expansion of the senses. In this cyclical movement, he summons presence and sensory and cognitive capacity to “re-know” the world, unveiling its constructed nature and offering the possibility of new associations between signs and signifiers. Art as a space for affirming freedom, where everything can be transformed and changed, is an unmistakable contribution of Cildo Meireles’ work.

Um Sanduíche Muito Branco, 1966

Um Sanduíche Muito Branco (1966) is the first object in Cildo Meireles’ career. After waking up from a dream with a strange taste in his mouth, the artist materialises the unfathomable origin of this sensation. He places a layer of cotton between two slices of bread, like the filling of a sandwich. In the confrontation between language, visuality and the perception of the senses, this object presents itself as an enigma.

Brought to CAPC Sede to be exhibited with other works that form summary statements of the themes of this edition of the Biennial, Um Sanduíche Muito Branco triggers the delirium of surrealism and simultaneously introduces the public to the first example of Cildo Meireles’ long practice of creating objects. Usually imbued with a political meaning, these objects present themselves as challenges to reason.