In the 1990s, Llinás ended one of his self-presentations with the lapidary phrase: “since then (1963) he has lived and worked in Paris”. Far removed from Cuban politics, the period is undoubtedly less turbulent. Yet it was in the heart of the former colonial metropolis that Peinture Noire was born, a good example of what Kobena Mercer called “discrépante” abstraction.
Peinture Noire is undoubtedly the most salient feature of llinasienne’s work. It practically coincides with his life in Paris, between 1963 and 2005, insofar as the first appearances of Abakuá signs mark the beginnings of Peinture Noire, in 1964 or 1965.
Although Llinás was not the first to practice “black painting”, his work has its own particular characteristics. His work goes far beyond the context of Cuban or Latin American art. It is in dialogue with the most important artistic currents of its time. Reflections on color as such and references to classical African art intersect, as do philosophical and ethical reflections on the course of history, justice and memory. In this sense, it is a pioneering work in the visual arts of the Black Atlantic.
1989, Retrospective Malevich at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Color Black
In his notebooks – which date back to the 1990s – Llinás collected quotations celebrating black for its particular brilliance or as a synthesis of all other colors. They include Matisse and Paul Valéry, among others. A quote from Aurélie Nemours, a geometric abstraction artist he admired, reads: “We use black because we feel that there is a concentration, a density that is so strong that it is of the order of light”.
The list is not complete, as Llinás knew many others: Motherwell, Rauschenberg, perhaps also Ad Reinhard; at the 1989 Malevich retrospective in Amsterdam, he let himself be photographed in front of two of the painter’s iconic black works (see archive). Curiously, Pierre Soulages’ Outre-Noir, the best-known example in France, is not on this list. Did he consider it too metaphorical? We can’t say that Soulages denied the radicality of black, the negation of the figure, the endangerment of visibility, which attracted Llinás.
In any case, Llinás needed black to create strong contrasts with white – as he had seen in Franz Kline – but also for the shades of grey that abound in his work. Contrast, of course, but all the more disturbing was the confusion between background and figure, the anchor of Gestalt theory, which Llinás considered contrary to the psychology of visual perception.
It should be pointed out, however, that the first Peintures Noires, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, were hardly distinguished by their use of black. In fact, the palette began to darken from the late 1970s onwards.
Africa
Africa is the second dimension of Peinture Noire. It doesn’t seem to play any role in the Cuban period (roughly 1946 to 1963, with two interruptions of one year each). Nor did Afro-Cuban art, despite the impact on Llinás of Wifredo Lam’s exhibition in Havana in 1946; despite Agustín Cárdenas, a member of Los Once; and despite the mediation of Roberto Diago, another Afro-Cuban painter, enabling Llinás’s first solo exhibition, in Matanzas in 1953. The awareness of being black was undoubtedly present, but not visible in his painting.
From 1958 onwards, Llinás came into contact with classical African art in European museums, in particular the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Shortly afterwards, in 1961, Argeliers León, director of a future research institute, commissioned Llinás to collect the Abakuá signs to be found in the streets of Havana, on the doors of sanctuaries and so on. To learn their meanings, Llinás had to wait for the book on the Anaforuana published by Lydia Cabrera in Madrid in 1975 (see bibliography).
The painter owned several important works on classical and traditional African art, as collected by European ethnographic museums, with a preference for sculpture and masks. His purchases or acquisitions began as soon as he arrived in Paris and stopped in the 1970s: the UNESCO pocket collection, Jean Laude (Spanish version), William Fagg, Olderogge, etc.
However, Peinture Noire is to be distinguished from Western primitivism (see Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, which was in the painter’s library) by a different intentionality. Llinás approached African art through the language of graphic signs traced on more or less flat surfaces, but he was also interested in the motifs of the facial paintings and textiles that enriched his repertoire. He was not interested in the meaning of these languages, so there was no question of approaching the domain of the “masters of the invisible”. That said, Llinás’s secular gaze was attentive to questions of rhythm, to interactions between the closed and the open of motifs, to negative space, to the effects that movement and time produce on these forms judged, in the West, to be hieratic and therefore immobile.
Abakuá signs, drawing from the 1990s
Pintura Negra, 1995, acrylic/journal paper, 130 x 95 cm
Black Painting and Western Modernism
Psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art is probably the most important theoretical book for the understanding of Llinás’ work. Ehrenzweig based his book primarily on musical analyses – the fragmentary character of melody in Beethoven – and abstract expressionism. This text, like Lydia Cabrera’s book on Abakuá signs, was acquired “after the fact”. The central idea is that automatism, by conjuring up Proustian involuntary memory, is a means of self-analysis. Paul Klee (whose theory of modern art Llinás bought in 1965) brought the notion of a journey through the pictorial work, insisting on the temporal dimension of the gaze.
During the gestation phase of Peinture Noire, Llinás familiarized himself with the theories circulating in Europe, particularly in France. Through his readings of Léon Dégand (1956), Jean Michel Ferrier (1965), Michel Ragon (1960 and 1971) and Francine Legrand (1969), not to mention his contacts with Lettrism, Llinás was introduced to the theories of the sign. The posters Llinás uses for his collages contain only letters, never images. In works produced in the context of Lettrism, he substitutes the abakuá sign for the Latin letter.
As for wood engraving, which Llinás considered to be the other major facet of his work, he was bound to come across Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the German Expressionists, “affective” primitivists, according to Goldwater.
Llinás was attracted by what might be called the expressive current that runs through the history of Western painting from Tintoretto, El Greco and Goya to the German New Fauves and Jean-Michel Basquiat, via Rouault, Francis Bacon and Alan Davie, the latter an artist whose catalogs he collected. According to Llinás, this modality was best suited to expressing a dramatic vision of human history. Peinture Noire was intended to denounce the injustices and tragedies that have marked it, hence the abundant use of the color black.
A Diasporic Art
Basically, Peinture Noire is at the crossroads of Western and African traditions and currents. Using the stylistic means of 20th-century Western art, it “tells the story” of what happens to the African sign: its fragmentation, obliteration and invisibilization, and its re-emergence as Form. In this in-between state, between indignation and enjoyment of the act of painting, a harmonious balance is never established. Llinás felt close to Bram van Velde. His notebooks contain an illuminating quotation from Bram: “When you paint, there are terribly difficult moments, but you must have the courage not to fear the worst”.
The unstable condition of traces is an aspect that comes back in force in the last period. Collages become more frequent in these years, often covered with signs vaguely reminiscent of fragmented, barely recognizable abakuá signs. Collage, here, could be defined as an intercultural practice, where the sign of African origin enters into conjunction with alphabetic writing, decomposed in turn to form a whole.
Signs, 2005, oil/cardboard, 21 x 25 cm