Guillermo Kuitca

Born Buenos Aires 1961
Lives Buenos Aires
Mozart-Da Ponte VI, 1996
Acrylic, watercolor and graphite on canvas
72 ¼ x 88 1/16 inches
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Lang Baumgarten

In 1987, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca began a series of paintings based upon city maps and apartment floorplans inspired by American novelist David Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes. Since that time, his paintings have included images of maps, genealogical charts, cemeteries, floorplans of public buildings and seating plans of major theaters.  Through such imagery, the artist explores moments of connection or separation in human existence by focusing on spaces in which the individual as well as the communal experience interact, and personal and collective memory are exchanged.

Mozart-Da Ponte VI refers to the trilogy of operas that emerged from the collaboration of Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In this work, Kuitca presents a view of an 18th-Century theater's seating plan from the perspective of the stage, thereby reversing the usual audience-to-stage focus of attention. According to Kuitca, in these paintings, "the light is not on the stage, it's on all the audience. The play is happening anywhere.  We are the stars and actors." By flattening out the space of the plan and bleeding colors from one area to another, Kuitca democratizes the theater's normally hierarchical seating plan. Luminous bands of color light up even the highest balconies, or the gallinero-the seats for those of modest means.