Les signatures noires: nuit d’encre

Les dernières peintures de Guido Llinás nos confrontent avec la pureté du signe. Aussi avec son obscurité intrinsèque, avec l’énergie nocturne de son inscription; avec son essentielle ambiguité, garantie de son déploiement dans le mouvement, dans la houle de la signification.

Mais ensuite tout s’efface; tout s’atténue et rectifie: les bords métalliques sont fluctuants, la bande noire qui les constitue reste prisonnière comme d’une corrosion violente, d’un geste furieux ou d’une réverbération. Ce n’est plus simplement support, limite, frontière de couleur ou ajustement de la forme. Maintenant, à son tour, il signifie, assume le sens de l’oeuvre, nous le dit, le signe. Signature noire qui dans sa nuit d’encre, dans l’intensité de son trait, ne laisse plus de place aux autres signatures insulaires: ces emblèmes géométriques, de craie, avec lesquelles les orishas attestent de leur descente, leur passage à travers le chœur enthousiaste des croyants. Algorithmes de pierres et de plumes. Blasons de cauris minuscules, de métaux rouillés, de perles rouges et de sang coagulé.

 […] Peut-être cette mise en relation, cette insertion de la généalogie secrète des formes dans le registre des signatures est-elle la véritable mission de la peinture. Montrer pour inscrire; donner à voir pour relier les êtres humains et les choses à leurs emblèmes occultes.

Peinture, celle de Llinás, de la filiation dans le regard, de l’instant signé et de la révélation.

Les gravures de Guido Llinás

Le Blanc, le Noir: on ne sait comment

tous les gris viennent au rendez-vous,

se conjuguent en rythmes et se résolvent

en infinies gradations.

Vois naître de gouges et d’encres

une cartographie: celle d’Amérique latine,

celle qui te contient et qui me contient

celle qui depuis des différences amères

est en train de modeler le métissage

qui nous rapproche et nous défend et nous propose.

 Territorios. México, Siglo XXI, 1978

(début du poème)

Le paradoxe du bois gravé est d’être un négatif, d’où, peut-être, ce rapport privilégié au noir. Ce qui porte sens y est, singulièrement, l’intouché, l’intact. Le travail du graveur n’y produit qu’une absence, une limite : le blanc.

Les gravures sur bois du peintre cubain Guido Llinás sont les traces d’une culture revisitée, portées à la lumière – au noir – comme signes plastiques. Ces formes souples et tendues semblent s’être déposées sur la planche comme elles affleurent à la mémoire. La trace des gestes y manifeste la lente apparition de leur image. Les marques de la gouge, les creux fouillés n’y sont pas dissipés dans l’uniforme blancheur du papier. Si le noir – la planche de bois – y trahit souvent sa texture, ses nœuds, les lignes de ses fibres, le blanc – traces du parcours de l’outil – s’offre aussi à l’œil et au toucher. Le travail de la gravure, lent cheminement vers une résurgence, s’y montre ainsi dans toute sa force, enserrant les sombres filons que Guido Llinás, heureux orpailleur, découvre sans impatience.

Antoine Coron, pour la présentation de Le long du fleuve, texte de Michel Butor.
Paris, Galerie Biren, 1983

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.