Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1961)

Tomas Cohn, São Paolo

Sonia Becce and Graciela Speranza, Conversaciones con Graciela Speranza. "Guillermo Kuitca: Obras 1982-1998", Buenos Aires, 1998, p. 46
Fabian Lebenglik, Guillermo David Kuitca: Obras 1982-1988, Buenos Aires, 1989, p. 80

The canvas is unlined. There is a possible scratch by the left side of the lower edger. Overall, this painting is in excellent condition.
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The triumphant paintings of Guillermo Kuitca, with their deeply psychological choreography, embrace an iconography that is intimate and profoundly personal. Loosely biographical, Kuitca's paintings from 1984-1986 divulge haunting truths to the artist's intimate reality as it was during this time that the artist struggled with substance abuse. From 1984 to 1986, cocaine and alcohol fueled sleepless painting binges. The rage to paint that ensued, however, ultimately produced works so creatively charged and emotionally loaded that ensconced Kuitca as a luminary among his generation of painter.

 

Untitled, 1986 is a seminal example of the body of work that Kuitca produced during the decade of painting that would catapult him into art journals and garner substantial critical acclaim.  Like many paintings from this period, Untitled draws its imagery from Kuitca's experience working in the theater. The stark topography, painted in solvent dusky hues, is rendered with an astonishing amount of economy with only calculated and discerning strokes required to create a deeply psychologically charged scene. From slightly above the picture plane, the viewer is beguiled into an austere interior where a dramatic and tumultuous performance appears to have unfolded and it is as if we are now privy to the cataclysmic finale. Chairs are knocked over and a ring of chairs surround a bed which is now consumed by flames. The only traces of humanity in the scene lie collapsed and entirely expended. The pathos of the scene is entirely orchestrated by Kuitca through the deliberate isolation of both the male and female protagonist and their physical and psychological displacement.

 

The abandoned scene, devoid of any narrative context suggests an absence of humanity, however, the prominent initial K, stoically suspended at the lower center of the quiet and still scene suggest otherwise. Kuitca's intrusive vision compels the viewer to be both a voyeur and yet the tension that ensues is that the glaring proximity to the inner sanctum of private and intimate spaces; leaves both the viewed and the viewer entirely eviscerated.