Las firmas negras: noche de tinta

Las últimas pinturas de Guido Llinás nos confrontan con la pureza del signo. También con su obscuridad intrínseca, con la energía nocturna de su inscripción; con su esencial ambigüedad, garantía de su despliegue en el movimiento, en el oleaje de la significación.

Pero luego todo se borra; todo se atenúa y rectifica: los bordes metálicos son fluctuantes, la banda negra que los constituye queda presa como de una corrosión violenta, de un gesto furioso o una reverberación. Ya no es puro soporte, linde, frontera del color o ajuste de la forma. Ahora a su vez, significa, asume el sentido del cuadro, nos lo dice, lo firma. Firma negra que en su noche de tinta, en la intensidad de su trazo, no deja de evocar las otras firmas insulares: esos emblemas geométricos, de tiza, con que los orishas dejan testimonio de su bajada, de su paso por el coro entusiasmado de los orantes. Algoritmos de piedras y de plumas. Blasones de caracoles diminutos, de metales oxidados, de perlas rojas y de coágulos.

[… ] Quizás esa puesta en relación, esa inserción de la secreta genealogíaa de las formas, en el registro de las firmas, sea la verdadera misión de la pintura. Mostrar para inscribir; dar a ver para ligar los hombres y las cosas a sus emblemas ocultos.

Pintura, la de Llinás, de la filiación en la mirada, del instante firmado y de la revelación.

                                                                                                                        Paris IX – 1988

Los grabados de Guido Llinás

El blanco, el negro: no se sabe cómo

Todos los grises vienen a la cita,

Se concilian en ritmo y se resuelven

En infinitas gradaciones.

Mira nacer de tintas y de gubias

Una cartografía: América Latina,

Ésa que te contiene y me contiene,

Ésa que desde amargas diferencias

Va modelando el mestizaje

Que nos acerca y nos defiende y nos propone.

Por encima de tiempos y distancias,

la pulsación que guía tu dibujo

y la guitarra campesina

y el poema que engendra la ciudad

son ya la punta del futuro,

la ancha plaza latinoamericana

donde hombres diferentes

se encontrarán un día

como estos signos que tu mano orienta

a una difícil libertad de pájaros.

 Territorios. México, Siglo XXI, 1978

La paradoja del grabado en madera es la de ser un negativo, de ahí quizás, esa relación privilegiada con el negro. Lo que singularmente le da sentido es lo intocado, lo intacto. El trabajo del grabador sólo produce una ausencia, un límite: el blanco.

Los grabados en madera del pintor cubano Guido Llinás ofrecen las huellas de una cultura revisitada, sacada a la luz – al negro – como signos plásticos. Estas formas flexibles y tensas parecen estar dispuestas en la plancha como aflorando de la memoria. La huella de los gestos manifiesta la lenta aparición de su imagen. Los rastros de la gubia, los huecos explorados, no se disipan en la uniforme blancura del papel. Si el negro – la plancha de madera – traiciona a veces su textura, sus nudos, las líneas de sus fibras, el blanco – huellas del tránsito del instrumento – se ofrece también al ojo y al tacto. El trabajo del grabado, lenta marcha hacia un resurgimiento, muestra aquí toda su fuerza, ciñendo los sombríos filones que Guido Llinás, feliz explorador de aluviones, descubre sin impaciencia.

Enigmatic Signs: Guido Llinás

The history of twentieth century Cuban art has been dominated by research and criticism of three phases: Modernism (Wifredo Lam, Amelia Pelaez and their contemporaries), the Generation of the 1980s and contemporary artistic projects. Those interested in developments in Cuban art are inevitably gratified by such critical attention. Throughout the twentieth and into the present century, Cuban art has played a central role in the international discourse of aesthetic evolution in the Western hemisphere. In speaking of the formation of modern Cuban art we must engage both with work produced by artists living on the island as well as that done abroad. Since the beginning of the Revolution and the start of several waves of large-scale emigration to places such as Miami, New York, Madrid and other sites, the Cuban diaspora inevitably has come to constitute an important element in the definition of Cuban creativity.

One often thinks of Cuban art as referential. Concrete symbols or narrative signs recur throughout its development from the first vanguard generation that emerged in 1927 to the most recent work of internationally known contemporary figures. Issues of national identity or references to political events often lie at the heart of visual expression in Cuba. Yet abstraction has also played a significant yet much less well-known role. In the early 1950s, the art world in Cuba, like other nations in the Americas and the Caribbean, felt a serious desire to evolve in directions similar to those paths taken by artists in Europe and North America. There was, on the part of some of the more experimental younger painters and sculptors, an anxiety to become more international or universal (to use the terminology often employed at the time). This meant looking beyond what were judged to be the confines of the national references in the art of the second generation of vanguardia painters to consider the consequences of the varieties of international abstraction, from the boldness of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists to the more subtle applications of non-objectivity of the Informalists in Paris, Madrid or Barcelona. In 1953 a group which became known as Los Once (the Eleven) held their first show in Havana. Althoug their number varied from year to year, the core group of artists (both painters and sculptors), including Antonio Vidal, Hugo Consuegra, Tomas Oliva and Guido Llinás, comprised one of the most vibrant forced of resistance to the traditional visual vocabulary of forms in Cuban art. The evolution of the group made for a significant chapter in mid-century art history in Havana. This development, however, was cut short by the Revolution and the ultimate departure of some of the artists for places abroad and the consequent dissolution of the group.

Guido Llinás left in 1953 for Paris, where he has lived ever since. The distance he felt from Havana (and his home province of Pinar del Rio) served to make his emotional and visual affinities for Cuba more acute. He continued to produce work in the abstract style he had developed by the beginning of the 1950s. The post-Cuba works often have generic titles (Signs, Black Painting, Red Painting). These paintings they blend the gestural qualities that relate him to Abstract Expressionism, with veiled references to Afro-Cuban ritual. Circles, arrows, the suggestion of an axe or a cross motif make their appearances in these pictures. None of these references specifically refer to a particular cult or form of worship. There is no instance of folkloric or primitivist self -consciousness. German art historian Christoph Singler has written eloquently on Llinás affinities for Afro-Cuban mythology, yet all instances of this is redolent of subtlety and a lack of specificity. There is no nostalgia nor overt longing for a specific time or place.

The work of Guido Llinás is discreet in size. Each painting demonstrates an assuredness and an expertise in the craft and the art of painting. Llinás continues to evolve in a way that both testifies to his personal and aesthetic energy and to his assimilation and reinvention of the symbology of his Cuban heritage.