Guillermo Kuitca at L.A. Louver - Venice, Calif

As much as Guillermo Kuitca's work has always been about absence, it also manages to close a gap--to abbreviate the distance between private and public space, the intimate and the institutional. Among the most arresting of his recent paintings here was a group that took as its starting point floor and ceiling plans from several grand religious and civic spaces in Europe. The plans derive from Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert's 18th-century L'Encyclopedie, where they appear as crisp, linear diagrams. In Kuitca's versions, they verge on the ecstatic. Painting in watery black acrylic and ink on white canvas, Kuitca has transformed the ornamental order of the plans into hallucinatory visions. The lines bleed and stray, the pigment pools into woozy, Rorschach blots. Like many of Kuitca's paintings over the past decade, these invest a form of impersonal mapping with lush sensuality. They redefine fixed geometries in terms of fluid motion, bringing to mind the way Kuitca perceives place itself as necessarily, significantly elusive. "The homeland," wrote Borges, one of Kuitca's philosophical mentors, "... is a continuous act / As the world is continuous."

In a series of smaller works on paper, also using diagrams from L'Encyclopedie, Kuitca again stages a collision between control and abandon. He has printed floor and ceiling patterns on photo paper and manipulated them to make the images shatter into brittle flakes of black and white. The decorative whole dissolves, beautifully but violently, as Kuitca undermines the certitude that the floor plans--as well as L'Encyclopedie and the Enlightenment itself--represent. He applies a similar fracturing pressure to printed seating plans of such Los Angeles landmarks as Dodger Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl. Chemically doctored, they crumble and melt, their structure corrupted in favor of an extravagant, fluid beauty, the beauty of ruins.

The formal elegance of Kuitca's work continues to base itself on loss. Nostalgia takes more subtle form here than in his paintings of a decade ago showing apartment floor plans weeping glassy tears, but it still exerts a wrenching power. Both National Pavilion and International Pavilion depict shallow theatrical spaces of brooding darkness and unsettling ambiguity. The interior of a proscenium arch in one of the paintings is filled with stripes as harsh as prison bars. An airport baggage carousel in the other sends two suitcases around and around, their unclaimed status translating into a metaphor of loneliness and displacement. Kuitca's art continues to thrive under similar conditions, which he ascribes to staying in his native Argentina, in a "state of permanent loss."

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group