This brief essay about Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux was published in the book Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1981). This work was presented in 1979 at the Centro Cultural Cândido Mendes, in Rio de Janeiro, after three failed attempts elsewhere: at a gallery in São Paulo (1973), at a gallery in Rio de Janeiro (1975), and at the MAM-RJ (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1978), where a fire broke out that year (which burned a large number of works by Joaquín Torres García). Cildo Meireles hired five actors to pose as “security guards” to watch over the work during the exhibition. The sense of risk created by the pile of match boxes (which could have blown the place sky high) is palpable in other works by Meireles from that same period, including Volátil (1980) and Condensados 2 (1970), both of which convey the threat of an imminent explosion.
Cildo Meireles emerged in Brazilian art circles in the late 1960s. He attracted attention in 1969 at the Salão da Bússola [Compass Salon], an emblematic exhibition at the MAM-RJ where he won the prize. He took part in events such as Do Corpo à Terra (1970), organized by the critic Frederico Morais in Belo Horizonte [in that regard, see in the ICAA digital archive by Francisco Bittencourt “A geração tranca-ruas” (doc. no. 1110681)]. In the mid-1970s he showed his work at the Sala Experimental do MAM-RJ, about which you can read the article “Sala Experimental” (doc. no. 1110602), written by Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado, and Paulo Herkenhoff. Cildo Meireles was a member of the group that founded the magazine Malasartes, among other activities during that decade. He is currently one of the major contemporary artists in Brazil, and has had several retrospective exhibitions at important museums in Europe and the United States.
