| Description |
Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1961) from Buenos Aires came to prominence through his architectural blueprints and map paintings; for example, when he painted systems of maps onto 20 mattresses at documenta 9 in 1992. His iron curtain design for Foster’s new Dallas Opera House in particular elicited much excitement in the USA in 2009. In this case, the serried rows of seats dissolve into a dark mass of metaphysical nothing-ness out of which they seem to be erupting. The curtain highlights this theatrical game most felicitously: the world of the audience in front of it, behind it, that of the theatre, of the imagination – and this very interplay hold a great fascination for Guillermo Kutica. These images originate from the dissolution of schemata and in the concentration of a surrealistic method of painting based upon water, so-called flottage, in which formal painterly elements can either dissolve or be intensified in the fluidity of the water, giving rise to the formation of backgrounds in the very concentration of paint. Some of the new paintings repeatedly adopt this starting point in a heavy, grey-brown form, whereas the map paintings seem to emerge in pure colour as aimlessly wander-ing traces of light or air. Other paintings resemble the indefinable image of evening in which we might immerse ourselves, although we could also be perusing systems of galaxies, whereas other paintings by contrast could be about the folds in time and space or the picture of the moon in front of a theatre curtain shortly before the final exit. A critic commented that Kuitca’s work emulates this »discourse without words« as a metaphoric manifestation, in which Robert Smithson’s entropic, immeasurable mind space is on a par with Bataille’s ideas about amorphic mass (informe), thereby dissolving into perfect processuality. |