Guillermo Kuitca at Unlimited
Inspired from a moment of spontaneity, ‘Untitled’ is the extension of an experience of the artist in the studio. Expanding the pictorial plane, Guillermo Kuitca began to move beyond the ends of the canvas and painted directly onto his studio walls, omitting any distinction between the two surfaces.
Constructed as a free-standing painted environment, from the outside the painted white wood structure of ‘Untitled’ appears unassuming while much of its ‘back stage’ elements remain visible. Akin to stage design, the work’s construction encourages the viewer to experience a physical encapsulation, crossing the threshold of a doorway into the painted realm, as if onto a private closed set.
Related to Kuitca’s earlier explorations of the architecture and atmosphere of the theater, the painted abstract forms on the interior of 'Untitled' pave the way towards a more personal and individual experience while still using the language of stage construction and illusion.
‘What we see through Kuitca’s inner eye is a fragmented snapshot of a moment in a history of a theater.'—Stephen Barlow
Guillermo Kuitca, ‘Untitled’, 2014. Installation view, Unlimited, Art Basel, Basel, 2018 © Guillermo Kuitca
‘Fond of remembering Isadora Duncan’s saying, ‘I could dance that chair,’ or Einstein’s claim that he could film Karl Marx’s Das Capital, Kuitca is a painter who aims at exactly that mix of concreteness and abstraction, figuration and structure, that Duncan and Einstein had in mind… in his attempt to transform painting, he became a painter of space.’ — Andreas Huyssen (1)‘…
Kuitca’s compositions pay careful attention to the characteristics of the places. He makes a clear distinction between his work and the structure of the room by restricting his paintings to the flat surfaces of walls, never wrapping over moldings and leaving switches or most other utilitarian objects exposed.
This enables him to fit his paintings into the structure of the rooms by following the pattern of the walls while maintaining a distinction between the three-dimensional architecture of the rooms and the projection of pictorial space across two dimensions.’ — Michael FitzGerald (2)
Guillermo Kuitca, ‘Untitled’, 2014. Installation view, Unlimited, Art Basel, Basel, 2018 © Guillermo Kuitca
Guillermo Kuitca, ‘Untitled’, 2014. Installation view, Unlimited, Art Basel, Basel, 2018 © Guillermo Kuitca
‘What we see through Kuitca’s inner eye is a fragmented snapshot of a moment in a history of a theatre … These works full of passion, nostalgia, space, promise, and adrenaline rampant and spent in the theatre of life.’— Stephen Barlow (3) 1) Andreas Huyssen, ‘Guillermo Kuitca. Painter of Space’ in Guillermo Kuitca. Everything, London / UK: Scala Publishers Ltd., 2009, p. 24 2) Michael FitzGerald, ‘Guillermo Kuitca’s Journey’ in Guillermo Kuitca, London / UK: Snoeck Publishers, 2016, p. 24 3) Stephen Barlow, ‘The Footprints of Performance’ in Guillermo Kuitca. Stage Fright, New York NY: Sperone Westwater Gallery, 2007, p. 7
