Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Guillermo Kuitca is not an ordinary painter. This 64-year-old Argentine, who has exhibited since the age of thirteen, has built a body of work that challenges our certainties about what contemporary painting can and should be. Far from fleeting trends and media outbursts, Kuitca has developed for over four decades a pictorial language of remarkable coherence, where each canvas functions as a piece of a larger existential puzzle. His latest exhibition “Kuitca 86” at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires reveals an artist who, beneath the apparent conceptual coldness of his maps, plans, and diagrams, hides a deeply human sensitivity towards questions of memory, identity, and displacement.
The theatrical legacy: Pina Bausch and the scenography of the intimate
Kuitca’s encounter with Pina Bausch’s universe in 1980 constitutes one of the keys to understanding his work. This revelation, which he describes as “devastating”, is not merely an aesthetic influence but a true conceptual conversion. Bausch had revolutionized dance by starting from the principle that “human beings can walk, and walking is enough,” an essentialist approach that immediately fascinated the young Argentine painter. This philosophy of minimal movement, this ability to create meaning from elementary gestures, now permeates all of Kuitca’s production.
In his early series like “El Mar Dulce” (1983-84) and “Siete Últimas Canciones” (1986), Bausch’s influence is manifested through a scenographic approach to pictorial space. The compositions unfold like fragmented stages where bodies acquire corporeal density and interact in simultaneous and disjointed scenes. Men dragging women, child pulling her hair downward, scattered chairs and tables: these images recall the gestural lexicon of the German choreographer. But Kuitca does not simply borrow a visual vocabulary; he appropriates the very logic of Tanztheater, this ability to transform space into an emotional territory.
The theatricality in Kuitca’s work never consists of mere staging. It rather proceeds from a conception of painting as a “theatrical arena,” to use his own words, where the artist takes on the role of the director. This approach explains why his canvases, even the most abstract, always retain a latent narrative dimension. Apartment plans, road maps, theater diagrams function as empty sets that carry the phantom trace of human dramas. The absence of human figures in his mature works does not reflect an escape from the human but, on the contrary, a presence defined by absence, to borrow the critics’ phrase.
This aesthetic of absence finds its origin in Kuitca’s theatrical experience. Having himself directed theatrical productions in the 1980s, notably the play “El Mar Dulce” co-directed with Carlos Ianni in 1984, he understands that the stage space retains the memory of the bodies that inhabited it. His later paintings operate according to this same logic: they are haunted spaces, architectures of memory where the echoes of departed presences still resonate. This approach allows him to go beyond mere representation to create a true dramaturgy of space.
The series “Seven Last Songs” marks the peak of this influence from Pina Bausch. The space expands while the bodies withdraw, leaving only physical (beds and chairs) and atmospheric traces. This progressive dissolution of the human figure does not constitute an impoverishment but an intensification: by emptying the space of its figurative dimension, Kuitca charges it with an unprecedented psychological density. The domestic space becomes the place where memory is inscribed, transforming each canvas into a silent score of an intimate drama.
This influence endures in his most recent works, notably in “Kuitca 86” (2024), this artist’s studio model where each element bears the traces of paint splatters. This work functions as a mise en abyme of the creative act, a miniature theater where the eternal mystery of artistic creation is played out. Kuitca reveals his debt to Bausch there: this ability to transform an apparently neutral space into a territory charged with affects, this alchemy that allows emotion to emerge from pure abstraction.
Architecture and psychoanalysis: The plans of the unconscious
The architectural dimension of Kuitca’s work cannot be understood independently of his intellectual formation in 1970s-80s Argentina, a country where psychoanalysis enjoys considerable cultural influence. This analytical approach to space finds its roots in the Freudian and Lacanian thought that then permeated Buenos Aires, a metropolis where architects, analysts, and artists coexisted in a permanent dialogue about the relations between structure and psyche.
The apartment plans that have obsessed Kuitca since the late 1980s are not simply an aesthetic fascination with geometric forms. They function as cartographies of the unconscious, topologies on which the intimate territories of human experience are drawn. This series arises from a “zooming out” process that the artist describes precisely: from the bed to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the apartment, from the apartment to the city, from the city to the world. This scalar progression reveals an analytical logic reminiscent of psychoanalytic therapy, where the patient gradually moves back from symptoms to their deep causes.
The standard apartment that Kuitca obsessively paints functions as the icon of the middle-class urban family. This insistence on a standardized architectural model reflects his fascination with the structures that secretly organize our existence. Just as the analyst reveals the unconscious mechanisms governing our behaviors, Kuitca unveils the architectural devices that shape our intimacy. These plans are never neutral: they sometimes wear a crown of thorns, crack, fill with bones, or adorn stains evoking bodily fluids. This organicity of architecture reveals the pulsional dimension of domestic space.
The “People on Fire” series takes this logic further by transforming geographical maps into family genealogies. Kuitca replaces place names with people’s names, creating relational maps that evoke the genealogical trees used in systemic family therapy. This substitution reveals the influence of his mother, a psychoanalyst, as well as an intuitive understanding of the mechanisms of psychic transmission. Family ties become geographical, revealing their territorial dimension: each family constitutes a territory with its borders, zones of influence, and power conflicts.
This psychoanalytic approach to space explains why Kuitca favors places charged with emotions: theaters, hospitals, prisons, and cemeteries. These institutions function as condensers of collective emotions, spaces where the fundamental anxieties of human existence crystallize. His theater floor plans, notably those of prestigious institutions like the Metropolitan Opera or La Scala, undergo distortions that reveal the phantasmatic charge of these places. Under the effect of hot or cold water treatments, these diagrams liquefy, deform, migrate across the paper like unconscious formations rising to the surface.
The work “L’Encyclopédie (siete partes)” (2002) is the culmination of this reflection on knowledge structures. In reference to Diderot’s project, Kuitca questions our obsession with classifying and archiving knowledge. His floor plans covered with stains and drips seem to collapse on themselves, denying their primary function. This series reveals the influence of Michel Foucault [1], whose works on disciplinary institutions (hospital, prison, asylum) illuminate the political dimension of architecture. In Kuitca’s work, institutional spaces are never neutral: they bear the traces of power relations that shaped them.
The recent “Family Idiot” series (2020), whose title borrows from Jean-Paul Sartre [2], pushes this logic to its conclusion. Inspired by the monumental study Sartre dedicates to Flaubert, Kuitca applies a total analytical method here, combining Marxism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology to understand the formation of an artist. This interdisciplinary approach reveals his debt to the Argentine psychoanalytic tradition, this ability to articulate family structure and artistic creation within the same analysis.
The poetics of displacement
Kuitca’s cartographic obsession finds its roots in Argentina’s historical experience, a country shaped by successive migrations and forced displacements. This geopolitical dimension of his work never amounts to direct denunciation but proceeds from a more subtle approach, where the poetry of displacement replaces the activist discourse.
The artist discovers maps at the very moment Argentina emerges from the military dictatorship (1976, 1983), a period during which about 30,000 people “disappeared.” This temporal coincidence is no accident: Kuitca’s maps function as anti-monuments to the disappeared, spaces where the memory of those without graves can be inscribed. Unlike traditional maps used for orientation, Kuitca’s are designed as “devices to get lost,” in his own words. This functional inversion reflects the experience of a generation that grew up in uncertainty, deprived of stable reference points.
His first map, dedicated to Germany in 1987, reveals the personal dimension of this geographical obsession. The choice of this country is not accidental: it crystallizes the tensions of Kuitca’s family history, whose grandparents fled the Russian pogroms to find refuge in Argentina, a country that would later welcome Nazi criminals. This historical layering transforms the map into a temporal testimony, where traces of successive migrations overlap. Germany thus becomes the symbol of a haunted geography, where each place name carries the memory of collective tragedies.
The mattress maps represent the peak of this reflection on displacement. By painting directly on these intimate objects, Kuitca creates a striking collision between the scale of the body and that of the territory. These works immediately evoke the experience of refugees, forced to carry their meager possessions into exile. The mattresses become islands of domesticity within the vast geographical space, fragments of intimacy preserved despite the uprooting from the native land.
This poetics of displacement finds its most accomplished expression in the installation of twenty mattresses presented at Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992. Lined up in the exhibition space like in a makeshift dormitory, these objects simultaneously evoke refugee camps, emergency shelters, and hospital dying wards. Each mattress bears a map of a fragmented Europe, dotted with pins at the locations of major cities: Berlin, Warsaw, Sarajevo. These works gain a particularly tragic resonance in the context of the Balkan wars then staining Europe with blood.
Kuitca’s recent evolution toward plans of performance halls continues this reflection on mobility. These venues function as microcosms where the dialectic of near and far is constantly replayed. The spectator occupies an assigned place there, but his imagination can take him to infinite territories. This ambivalence between fixity and movement characterizes all of Kuitca’s work: his immobile maps carry within them the possibility of travel, his static plans vibrate with potential displacements.
The revisited modernist legacy
Since 2007, with the series “Desenlace”, Kuitca has been making a critical return to the modernist heritage that reveals the maturity of his aesthetic reflection. This confrontation with the masters of abstraction, Jackson Pollock, Joaquín Torres García, Georges Braque, and Lucio Fontana, is neither a respectful tribute nor an iconoclastic deconstruction but a creative appropriation that reveals his deep understanding of the stakes of contemporary painting.
This series marks a turning point in Kuitca’s work as it explicitly assumes his relationship with the history of art. Until then, his references remained implicit, integrated in an approach that favored invention over quotation. With “Desenlace”, he takes a further step by directly questioning the authority of historical avant-gardes. His depictions of these iconic forms of abstraction function as “empty shells”, according to critics’ expression, familiar but disembodied artifacts of an imposed authority.
This approach reveals the underground influence of Jorge Luis Borges [3], whose literary work constantly explores the relationships between original and copy, between authentic and simulacrum. Like the Argentine writer, Kuitca develops an aesthetic of critical reproduction where apparent fidelity hides a fundamental subversion. His “Pollock” or his “Braque” are not pastiches but meditations on the very possibility of originality in contemporary art.
This series is part of a broader reflection on cultural transmission that has obsessed Kuitca since his beginnings. As he recalls in his interviews, his artistic training took place in a cultural “no man’s land,” without any real Argentine artistic tradition to rely on. This condition of aesthetic orphanhood explains his fascination with mechanisms of transmission and inheritance. His recent works function as exercises in artistic genealogy, attempts to reconstruct a creative lineage in a post-colonial context.
The “cubitoid” style that characterizes his most recent works extends this reflection. These fragmented and angular motifs that have organized his compositions since 2007 are not a mere borrowing from historical Cubism but a reinvention of its principles in the contemporary context. Kuitca develops an original synthesis between abstraction and illusionistic figuration that reveals his mastery of contemporary pictorial issues.
This evolution is accompanied by an expansion of his practice towards installation and the creation of environments. His interventions in three-dimensional spaces, notably at Somerset House for Hauser & Wirth or at the Fondation Cartier with “Les Habitants,” reveal his desire to transcend the traditional limits of painting. These experiences confirm the persistent influence of his theatrical experience: Kuitca now conceives the exhibition space as a stage where the viewer becomes an actor of his own hermeneutic journey.
Towards a cartography of the intimate
Kuitca’s work finds its coherence in this permanent tension between the intimate and the political, the particular and the universal, the local and the global. His maps never depict geographical territories but inner landscapes, topologies of affect where the contours of our contemporary condition are drawn. This introspective dimension explains why his works resonate beyond national borders: they speak of the universal experience of displacement that characterizes our era.
Kuitca’s strength lies in his ability to transform the most prosaic tools of our daily life, apartment plans, road maps, and theatre programs, into supports for existential meditation. This alchemy involves no mystery: it stems from a pictorial intelligence that knows how to reveal the latent poetry of our familiar environments. His works function as revealers that allow us to finally see what we look at every day without seeing it.
The exhibition “Kuitca 86” reveals an artist who has achieved a form of creative serenity. The eponymous piece, this studio model dotted with traces of paint, functions as an indirect self-portrait where Kuitca questions the very nature of artistic creation. This work synthesizes forty years of research: it combines the theatrical dimension from his beginnings, the architectural obsession of his middle period, and the meta-artistic reflection of his recent works.
This maturity does not mean any pacification. On the contrary, it allows Kuitca to fully embrace the radicality of his project: to make painting an instrument for investigating reality that rivals the human sciences in its capacity to reveal the hidden structures of our existence. This ambition places Kuitca in the lineage of great creators who have succeeded in transforming their art into a mode of knowledge.
His recent curatorial practice, notably his collaborations with the Fondation Cartier, reveals another dimension of his work: this ability to create connections between artworks, to weave networks of meaning that surpass disciplinary boundaries. Like David Lynch, with whom he dialogues in “Les Habitants”, Kuitca develops a total art that borrows its tools from all areas of contemporary creation.
Guillermo Kuitca’s work constitutes one of the most accomplished attempts of our time to keep the pictorial tradition alive without falling into nostalgia or academicism. His capacity to integrate contributions from contemporary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology, without ever sacrificing the specificity of painting makes him a model for future generations. In a world saturated with images, he reminds us that painting remains an irreducible act of resistance and meaning-making.
His influence on the international art scene attests to the vitality of contemporary Latin American art, but also to Buenos Aires’s ability to produce world-class creators. Kuitca embodies this generation of artists who have managed to surpass geographical categories to establish themselves as singular voices in the global artistic dialogue. His work reminds us that universality always arises from the radical deepening of particular experience.
In this era of uncertainties where traditional landmarks fade away, Guillermo Kuitca’s art offers a precious compass. His impossible maps, his distorted plans, his theaters in ruins teach us to navigate a world that has become unreadable. More than a painter, Kuitca asserts himself as a cartographer of the contemporary human condition, a guide for all those trying to orient themselves in the labyrinth of our modernity.
- Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison, Gallimard, Paris, 1975.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille : Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857, Gallimard, Paris, 1971-1972.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, translated from Spanish by P. Verdevoye and Ibarra, Gallimard, Paris, 1957.
