Guillermo Kuitca: Chapelle

Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1961) created a site-specific work in the chapel of the Hôtel Salé for the Musée National Picasso-Paris. Since his intervention at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Kuitca has developed a new language, echoing the architecture, which the artist calls ‘cubistoid painting,’ in which a set of intersecting lines, like so many folds in the plane, is deployed directly on the walls, forming a new pictorial space. Kuitca describes his place on ‘the carousel of modern art’:
"Many years ago, I painted pictures showing a luggage conveyor belt. I think that art history was the real subject of these paintings. Art would be this carousel: the work of art, a piece of luggage, and the artists and passengers. While waiting for our luggage, we ask ourselves several questions: ‘Will my suitcase arrive, and will I be able to recognize it among other similar ones? And if I took someone else's suitcase, would I be wearing their clothes? Will my luggage be destroyed forever? For me, these questions are a meditation on inheritance. They also envision a possible encounter with Picasso, as if he were, after all, another passenger."
For Kuitca, painting has a memory. Through these experiments, he links up with the history of modern art, Cubism being invoked as the trace of a movement that operates like a diffraction of reality, the construction of an imaginary space.