GUILLERMO KUITCA: A CUBIST CHAPELL IN THE MUSÉE NATIONAL PICASSO-PARIS
The Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca was commissioned to create a site-specific work in the chapel of the Hôtel Salé, home of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The final commission, whose canvas is the walls of the chapel, can now be visited.
Since his intervention at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Kuitca has developed a new language, echoing the architecture, which the artist calls ‘cubistoid painting’, in which a set of intersecting lines, like so many folds in the plane, is deployed directly on the walls, forming a new pictorial space.
Kuitca describes his place on the carousel of modern art: “Many years ago, I painted pictures showing a luggage conveyor belt. I think that art history was the real subject of these paintings. Art would be this carousel; the work of art, a piece of luggage and the artists, passengers. While waiting for our luggage, we ask ourselves a number of questions: Will my suitcase arrive and will I be able to recognise it among other similar ones? And if I took someone else's suitcase, would I be wearing their clothes? Will my luggage be destroyed forever? For me, these questions are a meditation on inheritance. They also envision a possible encounter with Picasso, as if he were, after all, another passenger”.
For Kuitca, painting has a memory. Through these experiments, he links up with the history of modern art, Cubism being invoked as the trace of a movement that operates like a diffraction of reality, the construction of an imaginary space. This site-specific installation was supported by the Hauser & Wirth gallery.
Guillermo Kuitca was born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca draws on a range of iconography, including architectural plans, maps, theaters, musical scores and domestic spaces to produce an oeuvre that explores themes of history, memory, structured absence, sound and silence and the tension between the empirical and abstract. Shifting from gestural mark-making to linear precision, Kuitca’s work mines varied aesthetic styles and histories, and in the latter half of his career, he has achieved significant acclaim for his deployment of a unique cubist style that masterfully reconciles abstraction with an illusionist form of figuration.
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