ART : An Artist Finds His Place in the World : Obsessed with maps, Guillermo Kuitca makes self-scrutinizing works that are leading art mavens to his Buenos Aires base.

The “Borges thing.”

That’s what most interviews with Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca fixate on these days. Either that or the fact that Kuitca’s mother is a psychoanalyst, as if, the artist says with a trace of impatience, that were an anomaly in a Latin American country.

Neither of those connections is gratuitous, though. Kuitca paints melancholic images of stark interiors with small beds and overturned chairs. He paints an apartment floor plan over and over, one time rendering it with a broken heart, another time filled with bones.

And he is obsessed with road maps, which he paints on canvases and on mattresses, often altering place names and repeating them across the veined surfaces. The map works, especially, echo one of the central metaphors in the poetry of the late Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina’s most acclaimed literary figure: the notion that there is only one place--where you are. Through all of Kuitca’s searching, brooding art runs a current of self-scrutiny and self-definition basic to his mother’s profession.

The boyish and blue-eyed Kuitca, 34, has become one of the hottest young artists on the international scene.

Kuitca, based in Buenos Aires, has shown at the Sa~o Paulo Bienal, Documenta and the Museum of Modern Art. A 12-year survey of his work was organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University last year and is now traveling. Kuitca just returned from London, where the show recently opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

At a recent interview he is tired, sleepless in fact, but amused by the irony of arriving in such a condition for the opening of his latest show, “Sleeper,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The show, organized by MCA curators Louis Grachos and Kathryn Kanjo, explores the theme of the bed, sleep and dreams through the work of four artists: Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Doris Salcedo and Kuitca.

Kuitca is represented by three paintings and an installation of 20 child-size beds aligned in irregular rows. Low to the floor and further dwarfed by the severity of the white box gallery they stand in, the beds evoke the loneliness of a shelter, the anonymity of a hospital. Empty and unmade, they exude absence and a sense of loss. A sooty wash of gray paint obscures the mattresses’ cheery floral and teddy-bear motifs, and across all of them Kuitca has painted a fragmented road map of Europe. Buttons punctuate the mattresses where major cities appear--Berlin, Warsaw, Sarajevo--making each even more of a flash point, a bearer of the intense weight of history, both recent and more distant.

“I don’t want to make a geographic or geopolitical statement,” Kuitca says. “It’s a map; it doesn’t matter so much whether the map is of Mexico or Norway. These maps all look alike, but they are of places that don’t really look alike. They only look very much alike when you present them as a map. In a way, they’re just names, not the real places.”

Kuitca avows a neutral perspective now only because he realizes that the places themselves are not neutral, because even left alone, each embodies its own share of conflict or, as he calls it, “geopolitical meaning.” When he started to paint maps in 1987, neutrality was nowhere on his agenda. He consciously sought out that friction that can spark from the mention of a name by selecting Germany as his first subject. The country came loaded with implications, not just for world history but for his own region and his own home.

Kuitca’s grandparents had fled from anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia early in this century. They found a safe haven in Argentina, just decades before the country offered similar refuge to Nazi war criminals fleeing prosecution. When Kuitca himself was growing up, during the “dirty war” of 1976-83, the brutality of Argentina’s military dictatorship was so extreme, he says, that it invited comparison to Nazi Germany, “and it wasn’t happening to your grandparents but to you.”

Argentina’s tumultuous political history has rendered it a country fluid with immigrants, emigrants, the exiled and “the disappeared.”

“The diaspora seems to me a perfect figure for what I know,” he says. “The Argentinean diaspora was much more important than the Jewish Diaspora for me. The times were horrible. I hated Argentina very much.”

Reading Borges restored Kuitca’s sense of possibility in his country. “No one is the homeland,” Borges wrote in a poem of 1966. “ . . . The homeland . . . is a continuous act / As the world is continuous.”

Having had a precocious start at age 13, Kuitca already had several gallery shows to his credit by 1980. That year, his expectations of painting changed radically after he saw Pina Bausch’s experimental theater company perform in Buenos Aires.

“The images were devastating,” Kuitca recalls. “For the first time I began to think that everything was possible in theater and not in painting. When [Bausch] first started to make choreography, she was thinking, ‘What can I do?’ She realized that human beings can walk, and to walk was enough. Those kind of situations, thinking about them in essential terms, was very, very important.”

Kuitca’s tableaux-like paintings from the early ‘80s bear the imprint of his contact with the company and his own subsequent work directing theater productions. But the conceptual link outlasted the visual borrowings: as he puts it, “the idea of conceiving the painting as a theatrical arena, in the sense that you can raise a work as if you were directing a piece.”

From his stark images of bedrooms, Kuitca moved on to paintings of an apartment plan in various guises--outlined by a crown of thorns or shedding tears--and floor plans of institutional buildings like libraries, hospitals and stadiums. Moving further and further away from the domestic interior like a zoom lens, he says, he then began painting road maps and even went the distance, visually, to paint a map of the heavens.

This shift in scale--which followed a logical progression at first, then circled back on itself when Kuitca began painting road maps directly onto beds--was one of the features of the artist’s work that intrigued Lynn Zelevansky, who organized the artist’s 1991 “Projects” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

“It’s very rich, and visually it’s fascinating,” says Zelevansky, now associate curator of 20th-Century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “The way a particular form in his work will mutate, the way a floor plan will become a landing strip--it’s very personal and always dealing with micro/macro issues.”

Referring to the static, symbolic beds etched with lines implying continuous movement, she adds: “The space-time relationship becomes very fused--nothing’s linear. All of these things are very rich and integrated and deep.”

Kuitca’s success has much to do with the poignant way he addresses some of the predominant issues in recent art.

With gender and ethnicity as the hot buttons being pushed by artists delving into the politics of identity, Kuitca has taken a more philosophical approach, musing on the nature of place and origin while embracing his own family history.

His work also shares the current vogue for dismantling traditional systems of knowledge--language, for instance--and revealing them to be relative rather than absolute, variable rather than fixed. Kuitca challenges the authority of maps and the convention of mapping itself, but his work breathes. It is human and sensual; it never becomes mired in or desiccated by theory.

And like it or not, being Argentine, he is still somewhat exotic on the U.S. scene. He is grateful but also cynical about the opportunities that the new internationalism and particularly the recent boom in Latin American art have provided him. He smiles the same open, boyish smile that sparkled across the cover of ARTnews magazine in 1991, next to bold type announcing: “Latin America: Global Outreach.”

This wave of interest puts him in great company, Kuitca says, citing such artists as Brazilian sculptor Jac Leirner and Mexican painter Julio Galan. But being lumped together for the sake of geographical convenience is frustrating.

“All we really share,” he says, “is other people’s ignorance.”

* “SLEEPER,”Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (downtown location), 1001 Kettner Blvd. at Broadway. Dates: Tuesdays-Sundays, 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Fridays, 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Through Aug. 6. Phone: (619) 234-1001.