Artful mapper of the modern dilemma.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Guillermo Kuitca; Argentine painter's abstract paintings filled with imagery - Interview

Twentieth-century writer Franz Kafka combined with sixteenth-century cartographer Gerhard Mercator might sound like a strange mixture, but that is an appropriate hybrid identity for Argentina's onetime painting prodigy and current international art star, Guillermo Kuitca. Whether it is his repetitive floor plans of the same generic apartment or his blueprints for stadiums, hospitals, cemeteries, or prisons, or finally his maps from on high of cities, countries, or regions, Kuitca always seems to chart the dilemma of life in our times.

Most of his paintings are devoid of people, and yet they speak painfully about a sad state of humankind. They are suffused with a sense of urban rootlessness, tedium, alienation, and anonymity. In life and in death, people inhabit little cubicles--beds, apartments, offices, cells, graves--and under these hermetic circumstances only rarely do they know the individuals destined to inhabit spaces nearby. Most disturbing is Kuitca's message that increasingly this human Condition has become universal.

"Borges has influenced me," Kuitca confesses, "that one man is another man, one place another place, the coexistence of past and present. These can be cliches, but with Borges the meaning is new and real."

By temperament, Kuitca seems a patient, methodical soul, probably a trait inherited from his accountant father. For example, in an untitled canvas dating from 1991, the artist portrayed an unidentified urban area as a grid of city blocks each formed by row upon row of hypodermic needles. "I painted each one in acrylic paint. Once in a while I have help with the plans and maps when it gets too mechanical, but basically it's something I like to do. I like repetition. It's rather Zen."

There can be a strong expressionist side to Kuitca, too, especially in his earlier works. They contain personal symbols that literally drip with nostalgia. The paintings seem to emphasize that personality is formed early by pivotal events that can never be erased, as in Nadie Olvida Nada [No One Ever Forgets Anything], executed in 1982. This concern with life's stages and his taste for analysis of deeply rooted behavioral patterns doubtlessly come from his mother. "Yes," Kuitca admits, "she's a psychoanalyst."

Whatever the impulses, Kuitca got started painting seriously at age six and had his first gallery show at age thirteen. Was that precocious? "I didn't feel that way nor did my parents," Kuitca recalls. "I first showed at Galeria Lirolay in downtown Buenos Aires. It was 1974. Everything sold. I was more convinced to show my work then than now. I have more insecurity now. But, I admit, it was strange living a double life: on the one hand as a child going to school and on the other sharing your life with intellectuals and reading critical commentaries on your work. One moment they laughed at you as a kid, another moment they glorified you. I was very worried that people only paid attention to my work because of my extreme youth, as often happens with musical prodigies. It took me years to work through that."

The work of Francis Bacon and Antonio Tapies had a strong influence on the boy painter as well as that of his countryman Romulo Maccio. Kuitca bought into their loose technique and ability to hint, suggest, leave things unsaid. Kuitca's early paintings and drawings also were sparsely populated, with smudged, distorted figures, threatening bits of furniture, and a disturbing sense of emptiness.

Now thirty-six, Kuitca has been a professional artist for more than two decades. Looking at his prolific output during these years of intense activity, a cyclical quality seems to emerge, or at least a handful of themes resurface time after time...