Nadie olvida nada: ausência, ditadura e desaparição em Guillermo Kuitca

Abstract

This research is a study of the production of Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca in the early eighties, focusing on his series of paintings called Nadie olvida nada (1982). In the analyzed series, Kuitca works in a manner of mourning, and rescues marks of the experience lived by the victims and Argentine society during the military dictatorship, dealing with sensitive and painful issues for his country, such as the absence of the dead and disappeared. The artist presents, through his paintings, the silence and emptiness that the years of repression of the dictatorship left behind, with images of empty beds and shapeless bodies such as ghosts. The work also demonstrates characteristics that are part of a contemporary debate about memory, past and trauma. Thus, the objective of this work is to study the series Nadie olvida nada, in order to address the issue of memory and absence in these paintings, as well as to draw relationships between Kuitca and other artists who deal in their productions with issues such as the dictatorship and disappearances, something that we are going to call in this research the aesthetics of absence