Estelle Nabeyrat (art critic and curator) and Christoph Singler (professor emeritus of Latin American literatures and arts at Université de Franche-Comté) review the work of Cuban artist Guido Llinás (1923-2005) and remind us that his works will be featured in a major group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, in 2025.
They explain, “In Paris, Llinás experimented with Anaforuana, a Nigerian sign system. His work then evolved to integrate signs and textile patterns, creating a unique abstract visual language. Llinás’ paintings are marked by complex layers and cultural memory, demonstrating early on the critical potential of Caribbean artists.” For full article and additional photos, visit Contemporary And – Latin America (C&).
While abstract painting by Black artists has long been on the margins, Guido Llinás’ work (1923, Cuba – 2005, France) showed early on its critical potential. When Llinás arrived in Paris in 1963 at the age of 40, he already had a successful career in Cuba as the leading voice of Los Once, an internationally renowned avant-garde group that included Antonio Vidal, Raúl Martínez, and Agustín Cárdenas. Llinás left Cuba due to his opposition to the sovietization of the country cultural politics. He had more reasons to leave the island: his homosexuality, and furthermore, the dissolution of Afro-Cuban societies by the government, which were the only institutions where Black Cubans were able to self-organize since the massacre of Afro-cuban members of Partido Independiente de Color at the beginning of the 20th century.
Once in Paris, Llinás began to paint Anaforuana, a sign system of Nigerian origins. During the first years he experimented with a blend of Action Painting and these signs, consisting mainly of circles, crosses, triangles, ovals, diamond shapes and arrows. Llinás was not a believer: to him, these signs were the African equivalent of Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane, a basic text on geometric abstraction. Gradually, these signs began to appear in his work around 1965. [. . .]
In 1966, Llinás comments on the exhibition, part of Dakar Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, that traveled to Paris (Cuba did not participate). He soon began exploring other sign languages present on the African continent, gradually integrating them into his work, in particular textile patterns. The Sign slowly began to shift into Form, moving away from its original meaning. Fragmentation was no longer just a symptom of destruction: it became the starting point for the creation of a new language. [. . .]
In Cuba, Llinás had painted several murals. His Parisian period transposed this practice to a smaller scale. In the 1950s décollage artists like Villeglé, Rotella, and Hains tore billboards from the streets and brought them into the gallery space, opening new possibilities for Llinás’ work. The billboards he collected carried the memory of the streets – visibly fragmented yet entering a new life as his “Black Signature” (Severo Sarduy) appropriated and transformed them. Different regimes of signs, color codes, and ways of signifying were put into dialogue, breaking down hierarchies between them. Llinás’ work is profoundly diasporic, self-affirming while sharing the fragility of graffiti and tags. In an unpublished statement, he once wrote: “(My) canvases give way to indignation at the ravages of time, injustice and death […] this is why my painting does not worship harmony.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://amlatina.contemporaryand.com/editorial/guido-llinas-the-incredible-story-of-an-afro-cuban-artist-in-paris/
[Photo above by Ivaan Andreev: Guido Llinás’ “Bleu,” 1967.]