The return to the human shape

By Juliana Fontalva
October 13, 2022
Guillermo Kuitca, "Untitled", 2015
Guillermo Kuitca, "Untitled", 2015

The return to the human shape

 

 

I would say that my pictures have space. That is in the

expression of making clear the obscure or metaphysically

of making close the remote in order to bring it into the order

of my human and intimate understanding. 

Mark Rothko





            The shades of darkness are discovered through light. A light that can only be dim. They are also discovered from proximity: there are textures, words, stimuli. As we get closer, the eye changes the shape of the iris, it seeks to adapt to each nuance. Darkness envelops us; it begins with the gaze, moves through the body, ends in our thoughts, in our ideas. Art summons the encounter of residual memory, that which is activated in the present, forgotten in some space inside us. The first time I saw the work of Guillermo Kuitca, who would later be affectionately nicknamed "manito" (little hand), his tones captivated me. From afar, it rests solemnly; it is a piece that proposes a space of hypnotizing contemplation. 

            I stood right in front of it and slowly began to approach it. I felt how the work built a sort of catwalk, like something out of a Francis Bacon painting. Surrounded by an atmosphere thick with suspense, the noises around me fell silent and I began to move forward with muffled steps. My first sensations were of a deep chromatic minimalism; the work seemed to draw diffuse borders, as if it were extending across the floor and ceiling. I got so close to the piece that I could see how the darkness of that deep blue changed, I saw layers of paint that I could never remember again, only the sensation of encountering them, of the presence of a blue that mutates its character. 

            A frieze of whitish forms covers horizontally the lower part of the work, a kind of transition, where a form dissociates fragment by fragment. This frieze brings lucidity to my eyes: I see silence, the stillness energized by a fractioned rhythm, I feel a concentric force that attracts and absorbs me. Does the light or the form emerge from the darkness or are they part of it? 

            From the disintegration of the form –which years later, when I reencountered the piece, I would finally understand– a hand emerges from the surface of the painting, as if it were a deep sea. A small hand that moves the layers of darkness to summon. Its ghostly backside has its fingers slightly splayed, in a subtle gesture that invites one to come even closer. Is the little hand moving? I remember it is a painting, but the feeling of life, or something resembling it, is latent. 

 

 

            I thought I would never see that work again. From time to time, it came back to me at the least expected moments, like a ghost with free will that visited me both in dreams and in reality. A good work of art always leaves its traces in the memory. Years later, the piece was incorporated into the Balanz Collection. When it arrived, we removed the protective wrapping with which it had been transported there, and blue, that indescribable blue, emerged from every corner of the painting. As soon as we fully uncovered the work, the catwalk came back into shape, as if it were dormant, curled up in the bubble wrap that contained it. 

            It is a piece that needs a certain distance to be observed. That withdrawal, that sensation of pilgrimage, of submerging, of being attracted by the force, of that suspended field of deep color, works as a catalyst of basic human emotions: anger, pain, joy, pleasure. The work becomes a scene. Coming from Kuitca, one wants to think of the theatrical, but this scene is rather a stage on which we place ourselves in solitude. It is the blue plain on which the artist places us. In this work, one is not looking for a Greek theater stage, a bed, a figure with his back turned, here the spectator becomes the only protagonist of the situation, the centerpiece that activates the magnetized blue.

            The white frieze found in the last third of the painting is composed of long shapes that are in dialogue with one of Kuitca's last series that began in 2007. At that time, modern language, a nod to futurism and cubism, is introduced in his works by means of triangular shapes that fit into themselves. With sharp angles as protagonists, Kuitca paints less and less human figures, almost abandoning all traces of human presence on his canvases. The few times he brings back the human figure it is, in general, a woman with her back turned, as if moving away from the viewer, entering the painting. In the frieze "manito", although the sharp angles are not present, Kuitca imprints the dynamics of futurism in a sort of ghost that recalls the human form, created by diffuse silhouettes that unfold on themselves. Faceted, disintegrated, separated, together and in constant collision. 

            The rhythm of the forms is confused with that of a dance. The figures are also assembled from their negative, the darkness that slips between their spaces, in a black air that arises from their lack of contact. From right to left and left to right, the ghostly forms reach their climax in the center of the canvas. A small and defined hand of a being that is in front of us but hides its face and the rest of its body incites us with a mute gesture to approach, to enter. “Manito”'s lack of spatial definition is, precisely, the monochromatic scenario proposed by Kuitca. The questions that float around this work are mixed with the certainties and, as a trademark of the artist, leave us naked. Alone with the work, a magnificent channel for our existential debates. 

            In 1964, the Menil family from the United States commissioned Mark Rothko to create a series of large-scale works for an ad-hoc building designed by the architect Philip Johnson. This space, which would later be called "Rothko Chapel," immerses visitors in an experience of communion between faith, art and spirituality. Rothko's vision of painting was one of absolute immersion, a space where art invites an intimate encounter with oneself. Where color, specifically the use of monochrome, transforms the action of contemplation into a space for spiritual growth, dialogue and the search for transcendence. Is color the force that tinges our subconscious and strips our emotions?

            During the first long decades of his career, Kuitca painted from the absolute scarcity of materials: little paint, few brushstrokes, he even dismantled the old furniture of his studio to use it as a support for his works. In the case of "manito", in 2015, the artist turns to a painting that seems to have acquired the wisdom of all those past series. A piece where, as in his maps, uncertainty and disorientation govern the configuration of an undefined space. We do not know where we are. The figures, which are present in several of the artist's series, such as Nadie olvida nada (1982), transmute to present, 33 years later, a ghostly character that is actually an allegory of disappearance, a great halo that the artist reflects in his works. A disappearance that is an end and the imminence of something that begins, the uncertainty. 

            As in the series of the late 90s, in which the artist paints airport conveyor belts, made up of large planes of cold colors and stripped of luggage, the desolation of the scene triggers us to a crossroads.  We must decipher not only where we are, but also ask ourselves where we came from, where we are heading, what we are carrying, what we brought with us. 

            We could venture to think that both in these conveyor belts and in "manito", Kuitca challenges us to find in painting, as a chromatic excuse, the proposition of the "almost". His blues are so profuse, complex, full of dimensions that only a good painter can endow their colors with so many nuances and confront them with the abyss of black, without actually being so. He takes us to a great lagoon where the sea and the sky merge to achieve what many artists seek: immensity, immersion, that state of deep meditation to which Rothko aspired. In this way, Kuitca leaves the darkness with its capacity for unveiling at its best, with its inaccessible regions, in the lucidity of its mystical plane. 

            In short, "manito" is far from a gloomy feeling, as perhaps the themes of darkness or the ghostly would seem to bring about. "Manito" is, in the alchemy of its experience, everything that at least I look for when approaching a work: that unequivocal sensation of electricity, of the imminence of confirming the suspicion that art is alive, that I am alive, and that, in those moments in which I stand in front of a work, I surrender myself to the confrontation, to the adrenaline, to the pleasure of the reflection of the unknown.