No Tomorrow

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.

Exhibition:
Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row, 1/6–28/7/2012