Naked Tango, 2004
Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work, Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca’s distinctive cubistoid style masterfully reconciles abstraction with an illusionist form of figuration. Informed by the worlds of architecture, music, theater and cartography, Kuitca's paintings seek to incite the potential for a theatrical experience. Shifting from gestural mark making to linear precision, and incorporating diverse motifs—spanning fragmented geographical maps and architectural plans—Kuitca’s work mines varied aesthetic styles and histories.The artist’s distinctive visual language was initially developed in his Desenlace series of paintings, exhibited in the Argentinian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recalling a cubist aesthetic and eschewing figurative references, Kuitca’s segmented forms and angular patterns act as the organizing principle of his compositions in this series. To create these paintings, Kuitca relied upon elementary human movements to map the surface of each canvas. Pacing to and fro, he marked the cloth with short diagonal strokes as he walked: a process inspired by the avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch's notion of ‘Tanztheater,’ which he first encountered as a young man of 19 in Buenos Aires. Struck by Bausch's dictum ‘walking is enough,’ in light of this experience, Kuitca sought to transform the narrative effect of his paintings to evoke theatrical fields of expression and reception.