The Brooklyn Rail

To puzzle over Cildo Meireles’s exhibition One and Some Chairs/Camouflages is simultaneously dumbfounding and appealing. There’s a new playfulness in his work that makes us ponder the what and why of perception, the way we understand what we see, and how the object depends on how we see it. We expect austerity in this conceptualist’s creations, which are familiarly recognized as elegant and monotone, and often installed with expanses of sand spread across a gallery’s floor made to resemble an indoor desert. By contrast, now at Lelong we find a liveliness and willingness to explore painting, color, and popular forms. Does a chair, for instance, have meaning as a “thing in itself”? Is it still a chair when disassembled? Or when produced in translucent materials such as acrylic so as to render it hollow in a colorless, sterile medium?

Meireles pushes many buttons in this show, and part of his conceptual game is to make us understand the absurdity of thinking these matters through. He paints over common objects, such as umbrellas, beach chairs, and tents in acts of translation in every sense. These range from altering materials to shifting dimensionality, to elaborating on the work of other artists, as in the painting of the stern high-backed chair held upright with PVC tubes, White under White (Kazimir Malevich) (1986/2023), and the ominous acrylic on canvas stretched across an aluminum structure so it becomes an umbrella, titled Black under Black (Kazimir Malevich) (1986/2023). His compelling piece Umbrella (1986/2023), in blue and orange canvas also on aluminum structure, is positioned in such a way as to create shadows, appearing to bring shelter from the sun, which in reality isn’t there.

Meireles's paintings express the power of color, absent in his earlier conceptual pieces. Various studies for chairs employ a warm, mottled turquoise as a backdrop to his exuberant orange pieces. The depth of tone and color interactions determine what we see and feel when we look at form, establishing mood as well as the idea of solidity. He also reveals how different dimensions determine power and relations as well as associations. Consider the objects Tenda de parede [Wall Tent] (1987/2023) and Tenda de Chão [Ground Tent] (1986/2023), both swaths of canvas painted an identical green, but each positioned differently to tell divergent stories. Wall Tent is suspended over an iron framework but affixed to the wall whereas the Ground Tent drapes over its metal structure like a camping tent, a concealing device with its intentions unknown to us.

Of course, the painting Estudo para cadeira – 3 [Study for Chair – 3] (2022) alludes, in acrylic on canvas, to Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 speculations. Meireles is occupied by the angle from which we view a form, considering whether the chair becomes something different if we look down upon it or view it from beneath, causing us to question whether it is, or is not, the same thing. The painting also recalls Borges’s title character from his 1942 story “Funes the Memorious,” who can forget nothing; the chair viewed from above is not the same as the chair viewed from the side. Meireles expands Kosuth’s conception with solid material constructions in One and Seven Chairs (1997–2023), consisting of one wooden chair and then six stacks of materials that would constitute a chair. Following the British Idealist philosopher Bishop Berkeley, we are led to wonder whether someone must perceive an object in order for it to exist? Berkeley's epistemology, known as subjective idealism, posits that only ideas and conscious minds constitute reality. Berkeley observed, however, that “other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things; which, as they are pleasing or disagreeable, excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, and so forth.” All of which leads me to an apropos conundrum by 20th century educator and poet William Hughes Mearns: “As I was sitting in my chair / I knew the bottom wasn't there / Nor legs nor back, but I just sat / Ignoring little things like that.”

Meireles is especially concerned with epistemology, the way we know and think, and how we use what we see. In other words, what we insert into abstraction to make it whole, or something else. Is the work true if we misassemble it in our mind? What associations do we bring to it to formulate our understanding of the object? Need reality even worry us?