Guido llinas

Guido Llinás Quintáns was a Cuban artist who was born in Cuba on 23 March 1923 and died in Paris on 4 July 2005. His transatlantic work is at the interface between American gestural abstraction, the expressionist tradition and classical African art. His work can be divided into two main periods, before and after his departure for exile in 1963. The first period was Cuban and covers the years that he spent at the heart of the group, Los Once, known for non-objective painting in a lyrical style. The second, more mature period was devoted to Black Painting, a style that Llinás embraced in the 1960s and developed until the end of his life.

The Cuban Period: 1947-1963

Llinás grew up in Pinar del Río, the main city in western Cuba that is situated in the tobacco region, in a black family which rapidly climbed the social ladder after the abolition of slavery in 1886. Llinás wrote a thesis on the pedagogy of the arts that he presented in 1953. Prior to that, he taught in a school attended by pupils up to the age of 14 on the outskirts of Artemisa and took summer classes in academic painting.

First Exhibitions

During these years, Llinás became acquainted with numerous anarchists through the education system. Encouraged by the art critics Luis Dulzaides Noda and Joaquín Teixidor, he exhibited for the first time in 1947 at the Centro Gallego in Havana with a group of painters under the age of 30 and participated in the inaugural exhibition of the influential cultural society Nuestro Tiempo in 1951.

Los Once

Llinás gained recognition during the first exhibition of the Los Once group in April 1853 at La Rampa gallery. The group was composed of 11 artists, hence the name of the group: the painters René Ávila, José Ignacio Bermúdez, Hugo Consuegra, Viredo Espinosa, Fayad Jamís and Antonio Vidal, and the sculptors Francisco Antigua, Tomás Oliva, José Antonio Díaz Peláez and the best-known among them, Agustín Cárdenas. Shortly afterwards the group was joined by Raúl Martínez, who would become famous for his Pop Art socialist style in the 1960s. The group exhibited several times in 1953. It organised an 'Anti-Biennial' in 1954, in reaction to an event co-organised by the Spanish dictator, Franco, and his Cuban counterpart, Batista, and which made quite an impact. But as early as 1955 Los Once dissolved due to an internal conflict over what position to take regarding the government at a moment when opposition against Batista was beginning to stir. However, the majority of its members continued to exhibit using the group's name until January 1963. The exhibitions in New York in 1955 and in Caracas in 1957 undoubtedly brought the group its biggest international success. In a review about the New York exhibition, Dore Ashton wrote: “The most decisive work in the show is by Guido Llinás, who paints in clear, flat colors and strong design, emphasizing the light of natural canvas." Indeed, Llinás participated twice in the Biennale of São Paulo in 1959 and 1961.

Trips to the US and Europe

In 1953, Llinás started travelling to the US where he discovered Abstract Expressionism works. He was particularly interested in Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell but also the colour field of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. He and Martínez, who studied in Chicago, are the two members of Los Once that are the closest to the New York school. In 1957, Llinás also started travelling to Europe where he delved into informal art, the work of Pierre Soulages and nouveau réalisme. After spending a week at the Maison de Cuba in the Cité universitaire de Paris – an international students' campus in Paris, he returned to Havana in 1959 before shortly returning to Paris with a grant from the new revolutionary government. Following this second period in Paris, Llinás taught in Havana's architecture school and participated in several events up until the moment when abstract art began to seriously suffer from the new directives of the revolutionary cultural policy. In May 1963, Llinás managed to leave Cuba4 thanks to the help of Robert Altmann, the son of a Hamburg banking family who had escaped to Havana during the Second World War and who would become an important collector, editor and patron of Cuban art. Although Llinás was already one of Cuba's5 historical painters, in Paris he would have to start from scratch.

Parisian Period: 1963-2005

The Attraction of Paris

It was in Paris that Llinás' work matured. In the early 1960s, the city was probably no longer the world's art capital but it greatly attracted Llinás nonetheless. The US, particularly Miami, held little appeal for him due to the racial segregation. Miami was the main destination of the first wave of Cuban immigration and was very conservative – something that Llinás, who had anarchist sensibilities, hardly identified with. Moreover, in terms of art, the city was very provincial. In Paris, Llinás had already created a network of friends from England, Italy, Spain and Germany. The city was at the heart of Europe and Llinás travelled a lot to countries both in northern and southern Europe. Furthermore, a growing population with African origins was settling in Paris at that time. Llinás visited several ethnographic museums, acquiring a large knowledge of classical African art.

The introduction of signs of Abakuá origin

In 1963, Llinás found a job at Galerie Denise René, where he interacted with Latin American kinetic artists. But he was also nurturing a curiosity about other things. Before leaving, he had started collecting and drawing the signs of Abakuá, a secret Afro-Cuban society of Nigerian origin, for a future ethnological institute. He decided to use this visual language when he became acquainted with Parisian literary circles. While Los Once was a group in the strict, western avant-garde tradition, Llinás was falling in line with Wifredo Lam, the pioneer of Afro-Caribbean painting by introducing this language of African origin while also keeping the gesture of action painting.

Engraving

At the same time, Llinás began experimenting with wood engraving, an activity that he would maintain until the end of his life as the second area of his work. He would Africanise his technique by using an adz bought at a flea market instead of using the gouge, his engraving recalling sculpture while embracing a gesture close to Expressionist painting. With this technique Llinás, who was passionate about literature, continued to engage with poets. Between 1965 and 1980, he made several artists' books with some of the great names of Latino-American and French literature, including Julio Cortázar, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy and Michel Butor, among others. The titles of his works are quotations from poets such as Eliseo Diego, Lorenzo García Vega and Octavio Paz.

Collage

Llinás also became interested in collage, a practice that Los Once had already developed. Llinás was inspired by Kline's collages but also in décollage, the lacerated posters invented by the Nouveau Réalisme artists. Collage, wood engraving and oil painting would come together towards the end of the decade in what Llinás would call Black Painting.

Black Painting

Definition

This idea does not seem new; not only does Soulages come to mind but the birth of Black Art or of a black aesthetic in the US, even if Sam Gilliam's Black Paintings began later than Llinás' Black Painting. Moreover, Llinás never clearly defined the concept. His notebooks and the statements made in his letters suggest that there was not any ideology but that it was essentially about defending black as a colour. He positioned himself in a long trajectory from Tintoretto up to Kline and Robert Rauschenberg by way of El Greco, Francisco de Goya and the German Expressionists. But Llinás' Black Painting has at least two other dimensions: an increasingly tragic vision of history combined with, in a less apparent way, the reference to the African tradition. In his notebooks, Llinás quotes Léopold Sédar Senghor saying that: “The Negro replaces the Greek: rhythm, violent contrasts, improvisation”. Beyond colour, it was an attempt to merge two contrasting aesthetics to create, in a violent gesture, a polyrhythm based on improvisation.

The Place for Improvisation

In the early 1970s, Llinás developed a process that would radicalise the automatism inherited from abstract expressionism and leave a large margin for chance. After covering the canvas with several layers of colour, he applied a coat of remover that he then sprayed with a powerful jet of water, leaving the canvas in the state of a scaled wall ravaged by the weather and covered with all kinds of traces. On this background, he would paint a series of signs of Abakuá origin that gradually became reduced to a concise vocabulary: an arrow, a circle within which a cross is inscribed and, in the formed areas, other small circles or simply dots. Llinás stripped this lexicon of its religious content, employing it as basic units of geometric abstraction: the cross indicating the horizontal and the vertical, the arrow corresponding to the line and the small circle to the dot. The geometric game is used in a context of improvisation, the signs stripped of their value of symbolic language.

The Sign-Form

In 1965, Llinás began participating in several events organised by the Lettrist movement, whose motto was the sign. While he learned how to multiply signs through the Lettrists, it was through the poster artists that he learned about fragmentation. Llinás eventually found “sign-form”, containing a coded meaning that one believes to be decipherable but that automatism, dictated by the unconscious, throws constantly into disarray. The idea of décollage became part of this development: the sign, as the trace of the painter's gesture is, like the urban space that interested the poster artists, exposed to destruction, erasure and oblivion. The remaining trace of these signs was, in turn, reinvested with the imagination.

Reflection on Memory

Black Painting is characterised by a reflection on memory, variations, deformations and disappearance. The memory of which it speaks is both collective, the canvas being like a piece of a wall onto which graffiti, tags and variably ephemeral signs are inscribed, and secret, as it is driven by the painter's diasporic situation. This obsession with memory is coupled with a reflection on the image, its destiny, its survival and the visibility of what is buried beneath the layers of paint that accumulate like the bundles of posters lacerated by Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains and Mimmo Rotella. Indeed, the African tradition represented by the Abakuá signs along with the traits, scarifications and geometric drawings inspired by masks and Malian rock paintings is also subjected to the test of time. A complex game is thus created whereby the three Atlantic shores constantly echo each other. Llinás' Black Paintings differ from the Afro-American arts, in the continental meaning of the term, due to their reflection on memory and the rejection of the archaeological principle, according to which reconstructing continuities from one continent to another would be possible. Llinás worked more on the fragmentation and conjugation of the parts, without desiring to pick up the pieces. In a spirit close to improvised styles in music like jazz, the artist did not seek to confront but rather to interweave different worlds that end up overlapping in his works – a dangerous exercise that Llinás fully assumed. Among the painters that he venerated towards the end of his life, it was Bram van Velde, painter of the impossibility of painting, who occupied a pre-eminent place.

Bibliography

Anreus, Alejandro. El gesto liberador de Guido Llinás, www.encuentrodelaculturacubana.com [archive] du 24 mars 2010.

Butor, Michel. Guido Llinás in Michel Butor, l'écriture nomade.Exhibition catalogue. Paris: BNF, 2006.

Desnoes, Edmundo. 1952-62 en la pintura cubana, in Nuestros Pintores. La Havana: Ediciones R, 1962.

Marinello, Juan. Conversación con nuestros pintores abstractos. La Havana: Imp. Nacional de Cuba, 1961.

McEwen, Abigail. The Practice and Politics of Cuban Abstraction, c.1952-1963, PhD, New York: New York University, 2010.

Menéndez-Conde, Ernesto. Arte abstracto e ideologías estéticas en Cuba, PhD, Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2009.

Sarduy, Severo. Las firmas negras: Noche de tintas.Exhibition catalogue. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Museo de Arte e Historia, 1989.

Singler, Christoph. Guido Llinas' 'Black Paintings': Afro-Cuban Aesthetics and Abstraction

A pepper-pot of cultures. Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean. in Collier, Gordon (éd.).Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, p. 417-432.

Singler, Christoph. Génesis de la Pintura Negra. La obra parisina de Guido Llinás. Valencia: Aduana Vieja, 2013.

Guido Llinás Parisian Works His Friendship with Wifredo Lam.Exhibition catalogue.Ed. HANDPICK | JP AKA, 2015

External Links

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