artnexus #9

A journey through the work of Guillermo Kuitca takes the spectator into a world of subjectivism where elaborate figuration symbolically recounts the situation of man, in the midst of his conflicts even though the protagonist is not man but the objects surrounding him. It is a work which uses elements from the theater, film, music and literature to recreate a reality in which violence and desolation are features of everyday life.

The Sweet Sea (1989), which appears on the cover o f this issue, is part of a series which Kuitca began in 1983. The following year he gave the same title to a theatrical work dealing with the situation of immigrants from the River Plate region, which he presented in Buenos Aires along with Carlos Ianni. This relationship between painting and theater also appears in the work titled No-one Forgets Anything, the text o f which from 1982 served as the basis for a pictorial series with the same title.

It is precisely in this series that there appears the basic object of his artistic investigation: the bed. Beds and other everyday objects, such as chairs, become the protagonists of the drama which is played out in his theatrical space, where the sense of place and time disappears in a network of interacting visual and theatrical signs. This desire to link mise en scene and painting is evident in the Sweet Sea series, with its insistence on the anthological image of the child’s pushcart running down the steps, a climatic scene from Eisenstein’s Potemkin.

Two other images have predominated in Kuitca’s more recent work: maps and the standardized layout of middle class apartments. As Marcelo Pacheco has pointed out: “After five years of work in which the narrative discourse was the sum of symbols and complex encoun­ ters over large spaces, the painter has now achieved a synthesis of expression. There is no longer any theatrical declamation or gesture, but a new kind of serenity. The spectator is now confronted by a symbolic austerity which speaks directly for itself."

IVONNE PINI