“I am not sure what an artist is. I never chose to be an artist. I have painted since I was a child and do not have memories of not being a painter. I do have memories of how art affected me.” – Guillermo Kuitca

The present work L'Encyclopedie (Ceiling Plan of a Salon in the Palace of the Marquis de Spinola, Genova), is a superb example of Guillermo Kuitca’s iconic use of architectural floor plans and maps as a philosophical point of entry into discussions of architecture, borders and frontiers. Here, one sees the dazzling architectural rendering of a salon in the Palace of the Marquis de Spinola blurred and obfuscated by the artist’s hand, transforming the spatial diagram into a haunting geometric abstraction. Kuitca’s L'Encyclopedie series is named after an attempt made by the French philosopher Denis Diderot to condense all of human knowledge into a single-volume encyclopedia, with each image from the series inspired by illustrations found in Diderot’s Encyclopédie. As seen here, the absence of a human form in the composition is central to Kuitca’s later work, allowing the viewer to muse on the psychology of space and how one navigates and remembers a place. The present lot also calls into question ideas of displacement and disappearance, and how this relates to the function of memory and knowledge. In L'Encyclopedie (Ceiling Plan of a Salon in the Palace of the Marquis de Spinola, Genova), the grand salon is stripped of its original function and glory; a ghostly shell of its former eminence. The act of drawing is central to Kuitca's practice, and when examining the work closely, one can see faint graphite lines and ink beneath the layers of paint, musing on both the permanence and reinvention of ideas. As the artist explains, “I am interested in the major contradiction between a medium…which is so specific and partial, and the abyss of an enormous knowledge of things." (Guillermo Kuitca , Hauser & Wirth, London, June 2012).