Planning stages: Josefina Ayerza on Guillermo Kuitca.

GUILLERMO KUITCA typically settles on a given structure as a form of emptiness. One may consider his work a kind of seating plan, as the Argentinean artist himself will tell you: Vacant chairs attest to an absence; what's more, the plan is only a representation, not the thing it represents. And so the represented thing becomes merely a gap, a void--space as an object. Such empty space accrues the element of time, and the hidden cause of the desire. Am I saying that Kuitca draws, paints, fixes his collages into the dynamics of desire? Yes.

Not that there is one and only one structure in Kuitca's work. Rather, there are series of ones, with each individual series depicting the form of a different plan: map, cemetery, stadium, prison, theater, or conveyor belt. The function of the structure is not to unify a series but rather to convey meaning to components of the series, to begin a count of what exists--namely, Kuitca's different plans, swarming.

For example, the artist's most recent show, "Guillermo Kuitca: Acoustic Mass," at Sperone Westwater in New York, took up the archetype of a theater with nine collages, each depicting an opera house. They included Covent Garden VI; New Opera House, Oslo; Opera de Paris, Palais Gamier; Acoustic Mass VI (The Old Vic) (all works 2005). These collages are made with remarkably thin pieces of paper, some cut straight, others in curves with bends, turns, and twists. With these shards, Kuitca …