Desvio para o vermelho

Since the late 1960s, Cildo Meireles has made his mark as a unique voice in contemporary art, constructing a body of work that is permeated by the international language of conceptual art while simultaneously engaging in a personal dialog with the poetic legacy of the Brazilian neoconcretism of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. His pioneering work in the field of installation art is striking for its wide range of supports, techniques and materials, nearly always leading to broader political and social issues. Desvio Para o Vermelho [Red Shift] is thus one of his most complex and ambitious works – conceived in 1967, assembled in several versions since 1984 and on permanent display at Inhotim since 2006. It is made up of three interlinked environments. In the first, Impregnação [Impregnation] we come upon an wide-ranging monochromatic collection of furniture, objects and works of art in different tones, brought together “plausibly and yet improbably” by some domestic idiosyncrasy. In the following environments, Entorno [Surroundings] and Desvio [Shift], we have what the artist calls anecdotal explanations of the same phenomenon as in the first room, where color saturates material, to become material. The work is open to a range of symbolisms and metaphors, from the violence of blood to ideological connotations, but what interests the artist is to offer the viewer a sequence of sensory and psychological impacts: a series of false logical assumptions that always lead us back to the same starting point.