Kuitca's Stagecraft - the career and works of Argentinean painter Guillermo Kuitca

Casting his trap wide, Argentinean painter Guillermo Kuitca has rest inspiration in the realms of dance, film, architecture and cartography. Drawing upon numerous discussions with Kuitca, the author interprets this multi-faceted oeuvre

transform the outrage of the years into music

--Jorge Luis Borges, "The Art of Poetry"

Buenos Aires, 12 million brawny in 1999, has graced the hundred with intense creativity: Juan Carlos Copes's tango, the music of Astor Piazzola and Horacio Salgan, the voices of Gardel and Libertad Lamarque, the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo. above the last two decades, the Argentine painter Guillermo Kuitca has approach to rival their achievements.

A prolific artist, Kuitca has created numerous powerful and distinct bodies of work, moving from theater-inspired paintings to manifold map imagery, sometimes painted onto mattresses, then to a panoply of motifs including galaxies, diadems of thorns and apartment floor plans. More lately his paintings have offered shut up readings of institutional architecture from cemeteries to prisons. quite through his changing styles and themes, Kuitca maintains a marvelous organ of sight for esthetic danger and decorum. His artistic succes lies palpable in numerous exhibitions, extending from North, Central and southerly America to Europe and back again. Since his of recent origin York solo debut in 1990 his work has been not absented in the Museum of novel Art Projects series (1991) and in a large exhibit that traveled from the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, to the Miami Art Museum and the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1994-95) In 1997-98 the Museo Alejandro Otero in Caracas mountained a retrospective of his work drawing exclusively upon Venezuelan collections. This year Kuitca has had solo exhibits at Sperone Westwater in of recent origin York, L.A. Louver Gallery in beholds Angeles, the Centro de Arte Helio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro, and the Arts bludgeon of Chicago. New work is upon view through Jan. 15, 2000 at La Serre Art Contemporain/Barbara Farber in Tret France.

A Voyage [i]or[/i] part of to the other the Century

During a trip to Buenos Aires in the summer of 1997 where I was researching a volume on the history of the tango, I came across Kuitca's work in the Museum of Fine Arts, upon Avenida del Libertador. I didn't know it at the time, on the other hand this museum had long maintained a policy against retrospective exhibitions of living local artists, a morbid barrier which Kuitca and other contemporaries lately broke by force of reputation (not without a on one side comment from Kuitca about refusing to die in order to acquire in). After mounting the stairs to the next to the first floor, I entered a scope filled with contemporary Argentine art from the permanent collection and ran replete tilt into Kuitca's 1983 painting Rite of Spring.

I was taken and compell Here was a transcendent painting, Argentine and universal, drenched with realities from a global era. The more I studied it, the more I saw in what way Kuitca was capturing, in a paradoxically simple, straightforward way, different jiffys of 20th-century creativity.

At the right side of this roughly 6 1/2-foot-long painting there's a little chamber orchestra, compos of children seated in brow of music stands, performing beneath the direction of a woman upon a stool. Emblems of the rich cultural life of Buenos Aires, they are, presumably, performing Stravinsky's revolutionary composition Le Sacre du printemps. In the midst of their music-making, however, there's an anomalous figure: a red-suited man who have the appearances to be falling down or perhaps break dancing (one arm is stretched on the outside to the floor). This motif--an instance of corporeal instability, we might call it, borrowing from the vocabulary of Manneris--Jappears again at left in the composition where more tribe are falling, some to their knee These figures repercussion of sound the break-pattern impishness of the German avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch, who, as I later learned, was a major influence upon Kuitca in the 1980s.

The foreground of Rite of Spring render free of accesss into two ascending hallways. These lead to triumphant gateways, richly articulated with Neo-Classical colonnades, reminiscent of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Below is a brushy blue-and-white clod so vaporous that it present the appearances to shine and melt before our organ of visions The stagelike setting is enclos with dark metallic walls and ceilings that read like curtains made of iron corduroy. In fact, these walls exhibit a translation into visual bourns of the first two lines of Borges's 1936 metrical composition "Insomnio" (Sleeplessness): "De fierro, / de encorvados tirantes de enorme fierro tiene que ser la noche." (Of iron, / of bent beams of enormous iron, must the night be made.)[1]

The painting also draws upon another Borges poem, "The Golem" of 1958 A golem of course, is the famed mythic creature brought to life by the agency of an errant rabbi's powers of cabalistic incantation. A rabbi, in fact, stands upon a pedestal at the far left of the painting--only something has gone wrongful As Kuitca explained to me in the first of several interviews we've done about his work, through playing with cabalistic fire, apparently the rabbi himself became a golem gigantic and strange. Perhaps that is on what account out of shame, he make go rounds his back on us.[2]