Review of Guillermo Kuitca: This way, published in June 2014 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.
Guillermo Kuitca, “Untitled,” 2014. Oil on wood, four-panel installation 1023/8 × 176 × 124 ̋. Courtesy sperone Westwater, New York.
GUILLERMO KUITCA This Way
SPERONE WESTWATER | APRIL 24 – JUNE 21, 2014
In the narrow selection of Guillermo Kuitca’s new paintings on display at Sperone Westwater, the artist seems to have lost all desire for grounding points of reference. The gallery space has been converted into a labyrinthine garden of Kuitca’s design, a nameless land with neither signposts nor inhabitants. Guillermo Kuitca’s oeuvre arises from a confluence of disparate inspiration—traces of obsolete cartography and the choreography of Pina Bausch. But this series of new work breathes loneliness above all else.
“Guillermo Kuitca, despair and isolation (desesperacion y aislamiento)” reads the only scribble painted on one small white rectangle in the artist’s otherwise fully composed canvas. Most of the paintings and collages included in This Way are without figures and the one muted grey silhouette in the entire show is a hauntingly solitary woman standing in the doorway of a milky-pink room. Chiefly devoid of titles or geographical orientation, the little bit of language that does interrupt the flow of paint is bleak.
Though Kuitca rejects any reading of his art through the lens of his biography, this outcry of solitude is apt messaging for the child of a Russian-Argentine psychoanalyst. Kuitca had his first solo show in Buenos Aires at the ripe age of 13 in the midst of the country’s “dirty war,” which generated a mass exodus and left deep puncture wounds in the lives of those who stayed. At 16, the precocious Kuitca began exploring theater, and there remains a directive force in how his works generate movement through the gallery space.