Black paint painter

La Peinture Noire

Peinture Noire is undoubtedly the most striking feature of his work. Although he was not the first to practice "black painting", his own has its own particular characteristics. It combines reflections on color as such, references to classical African art, and philosophical and ethical reflections on the course of history, justice and memory.

The painters of black paint

Llinás had his photo taken in front of some of the Black Paints lights of the 20e century.

Image 1: Here in 1989, in front of Black square on white background (1915), in Malevich's retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Another photograph in the archives shows him in front of one of the Last Paintings that Ad Reinhardt executed in the 1960s, in 1979 at the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

In the quotations found in his notebooks, black is often celebrated for its particular brilliance or as a synthesis of all other colors. In this register of exaltation is quoted Aurélie NemoursWe use black because we feel that there is a concentration, a density that is so strong that it is on the order of light". However, Outre-Noir by Pierre Soulagesthe best-known example in France, is not on this list. Would it have been too metaphorical? Would he have denied the radicality of black, its negation of the figure, its endangerment of visibility, which attracted Llinás? Georg Muche in black. The latter spent only one night there, it seems).

Llinás needed black to create strong contrasts with white - as he had seen in Franz Kline -but also for the shades of gray that abound in his work. The contrast, of course, but all the more disturbing was the confusion between background and figure, the anchor of the Gestalt theory that Llinás deemed inadmissible.

Africa

Far from being the only key to Peinture Noire, Africa is indeed its second dimension. It doesn't seem to play any role in the Cuban period (roughly 1946 to 1957, and roughly 1959 to 1963). Nor did Afro-Cuban art, despite the impact of Wifredo Lam's 1946 exhibition in Havana; despite Agustín Cárdenas, a member of Los Once; and despite Roberto Diago's mediation, which led to Llinás's first solo exhibition in Matanzas in 1953. The consciousness of being black was undoubtedly present, but not visible in his painting.

From 1958 onwards, contact with classical African art was made in European museums, in particular the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium.

Image 2: Llinás at the Royal Museum for Central Africa Tervuren, 2001.

Llinás owned several important works on classical and traditional African art, namely sculpture and masks. He was also interested in facial paintings - geometric - and textile motifs, which enriched the signs abakuáthe introduction of which initiated his Black Paint.

Llinás appreciated the power of African motifs, but Peinture Noire is distinct from Western primitivism (see Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in modern art, which was in the painter's library) through the treatment these motifs/signs undergo. In the painter's archives is a series of photos of a mask he made for an exhibition in 1987 (the work, a painted canvas dismantled from its frame, has been lost). They show his reaction to Demoiselles d'Avignona work by Picasso that introduced classical African art to 20th-century European art.

Image 3: Ancestral, 1987.

Ancestrality is therefore a Western mask. "This mask is not me," reads the subtitle.

In another aspect of llinasian work, woodcut, Llinás was bound to come across Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the German Expressionists who were masters of this technique. Llinás was to introduce collage, inspired by Michael Rothenstein's book, Frontiers of Printmaking, published in 1966.

Black Painting and Western Modernism

Llinás was drawn to what might be called the expressive tradition that runs through the history of Western painting, from Tintoretto, El Greco and Goya through Georges Rouault to the German New Fauves of the 1980s. It expressed a dramatic vision of the injustices and tragedies that have marked human history.

According to one version, Los Once, the avant-garde group Llinás had co-founded in 1953, was primarily influenced by New York abstract expressionism. Yet the Havana scene - and Llinás in particular - was also receiving news of European informel. His first attempts at abstraction were marked by CoBrA. That said, the influence of Abstract Expressionism is undeniable. It is the gesturality, the visibility of the line, the all-over practiced by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, that Llinás will retain; in fact, among los Once, only Antonio Vidal and Raúl Martínez followed this line.

He appreciated the formalism of Clement Greenberg, the great theorist of the reduction of plastic art to its "own" means. That said, contrary to Greenbergian orthodoxy, he maintained, with Max Beckmann, the depth of the surface, and with Paul Klee, he appreciated the notion of a journey through the work, giving importance to the temporal dimension. However, by stimulating the unconscious, painting was a means of self-analysis, a trait that doesn't sit well with this credo. Probably the most important theoretical book for Llinás is The hidden order of artby Anton Ehrenzweig, in which psychoanalysis and formal study are convincingly combined for the first time. Ehrenzweig based his work primarily on musical analysis - the fragmentary character of melody in Beethoven - and abstract expressionism.

Diasporic art

Basically, the Black Paint is at the crossroads of Western and African traditions and trends. 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 have to have the courage not to fear the worst".

The elusive state of the traces is an aspect that comes back in force in the last years of his life. When graffiti and tagging began to take over city walls in the 1970s and 80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat became Llinás' new hero. In his eyes, his works were self-affirmations, yet uncertain. Llinás rediscovers an old practice in his work.

Image 4: Crowned Self-Portrait, 1975

Since his Cuban period, he had been creating murals (see archive section). He also saw the torn posters of Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella during his first stay in Paris, from late 1957 to January 1959. By peeling off whole bundles of posters, they brought the memory of the streets into the gallery space: this is probably what inspires Llinás's collages, most of which are made from image-free posters; as a reaction to the Lettrism with which he was associated for a time in the 1960s, he paints signs - or sketches of signs - over them, making it difficult in places to distinguish between background and foreground. It's not simply a question of erasing Western writing: it's part of the game of gestural writing. Collage is undoubtedly a powerful tool in the confrontation-that-is-conjunction of two cultural modes of expression. Ultimately, it was a matter of de-hierarchizing the multiple cultures that Llinás carried within him, and which he arranged as a "medium" (as he defined himself).