Cildo Meireles

Virtual Spaces: Corner 1 simulates, with a twist, the corner of a domestic room, complete with parquet flooring, a painted baseboard, and canvas-covered walls. It is the first of a series of works that marked a breakthrough in Cildo Meireles’s artistic trajectory when he was only nineteen years old. “At the end of 1967, I created a series of preparatory drawings for the Virtual Spaces: Corners...” Life-size in scale, this part-painting/part-object relies on the movement of the viewer. “These works are about orthogonal virtual effects obtained from non-orthogonal projection planes. They provide an analysis of the phenomenon of virtuality through Euclidean principles of space (three planes of projection) transposed to the image of an internal corner of a house.”
Meireles's Corners series provided the artist with an opportunity to explore solutions to questions of mathematics and geometry, disciplines that have always attracted him: “The works in the series were very much conceived as theorems. They are a demonstration, not specifically in terms of the eye, but in terms of the position of the viewer in relation to the work. They presuppose the viewer’s displacement, and the finding of this position.”