Guido Benito Leopoldo Llinás Quintáns

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Among visual artists, critics, and researchers, the work of Guido Llinás is known as being associated with the so-called Group Los Once. He spent most of his life in Paris and was a prominent member of abstract expressionism in Latin America.

He was born in Pinar del Río

His childhood, adolescence, and youth shaped a peculiar personality characterized by a sense of belonging to a large family in a small city where everyone knows each other, though this does not necessarily mean that such knowledge corresponds to the truth.

In Pinar del Río, the capital of the western part of the Island, Guido developed the formation of aptitudes and attitudes that, after his long life, would apparently disappear because in reality they were only variants of the same mimicry.

Artemisa, the Red Villa, would constitute an intermediate scenario in which Guido would find new motivations that would serve to develop in him what we could call the sense of life, which consists of fulfilling that difficult condition imposed by philosophy since ancient Greece: "Know thyself."

Havana, end and beginning of life for all Cubans not born there, is the last and decisive stage that would mark the path of that pinareño who began very young to glimpse the magical world of visual arts. The young master who began to paint in Artemisa. And the artist who, together with other young people in Havana, dared to break the molds established by the renowned painters of the so-called School of Paris.

At age 40, in 1963, his departure to Paris, leaving behind the secure shelter that the Group Los Once had become, meant confirming the assertion of José Lezama Lima: "What matters is not the target, but the arrow."

In addition to dedicating his life in Paris to his passion for painting, Cuban artist Guido Llinás always painted what he felt like, as if each day he were rediscovering the freedoms of abstract expressionism.

"I still can't wrap my head around living outside of Cuba," says Llinás. "In any case, being in Paris situates you. When you're in Cuba, where there are 25 painters, you can believe you're great, but when you get there, where there are 30,000, you go to 25 galleries and, even if your vanity takes you far, there are 25 painters better than you. Then you have to go back to your house and paint calmly, because you can be sure that you won't see one of your paintings hanging in a gallery, not even by a miracle, until your time comes. That's the advantage: it puts you in your place."

An abstract painter? Yes, one of those who pulls a rabbit out of a hat, without there being a rabbit or a hat; only unprecedented forms that should be enough to confirm the uniqueness of each human being. Art as an effort to reveal a common heritage, imagination, which appears in forms before the eyes of another. One of Llinás's achievements is to have shared through images the certainty of his freedom.

How can we know, however, that it's not an impostor? How does one distinguish an abstract painter from someone who comes and makes a few brushstrokes on a canvas without expressing anything truly particular?

"That's obvious," Llinás responds. "The one who has nothing to say in painting turns those brushstrokes into what he thinks is decorative. Everyone is convinced that the decorative is accepted, and there's something true about that. But the moment it comes to expressing something plastically, the subconscious emerges. The painter recognizes himself; because one discovers another subconscious there."

At age 22, Llinás left his native Pinar del Río, in the western part of the island, to go conquer Havana. It was then said that there already existed truly Cuban painting, represented by artists such as Amelia Peláez and René Portocarrero, but a new generation of young people wanted to distance themselves from that school. Several came together in the group Los Menores de 30 (The Under 30s), which included, among others, José Mijares and Roberto Diago. And in 1953, brought together by Llinás and Tomás Oliva, those who would from then on be remembered as Los Once exhibited in a collective show that marks the before and after of Cuban painting.

"It was a generational issue," explains Llinás. "European hegemony ended when American abstract expressionism began, and in Havana there was an atmosphere that anyone young painted anything. Oliva and I decided to select those who were closest to abstraction, and we got 11: seven painters and four sculptors. The only ones of us who did expressionism, but not pure abstraction yet, were Oliva and me. There were pure postcubists, like José Ignacio Bermúdez, who exhibited a disfigured chair."

A deep intellectual curiosity explains his progressive communion with abstract expressionism. He left Pinar del Río convinced that mastery of drawing was essential for an artist, and that the function of colors was to fill in. Later he learned of long theoretical reflections dedicated to denying the necessity of line, on the pretext that there are no lines in Nature. The limits, according to these debates, were marked by differences in colors.

"Van Gogh managed to express himself with tremendous intensity of colors without contrasts," comments the Cuban painter. "In painting, to achieve a very luminous color, normally there has to be a contrast, a shadow, or a background. Van Gogh proved it was possible to combine yellows and blues of the same tonal intensity, until the cubists came along with the idea of violating the plane, but the fact is that in nature there isn't any plane either. One thing led to another. When Cézanne stopped doing normal perspective and started raising the level, all it took was for someone to come along and push a bit for cubism to emerge."

That's why, he asserts, art is like a Russian matryoshka doll (hollow wooden dolls shaped like bowling pins that fit inside each other).

"There's a line that comes from El Greco, goes to Van Gogh, to Picasso, and ends with Pollock," says Llinás. "Those on the other side come from Velázquez. And even though Europeans didn't accept, and in some cases still don't accept, American predominance, in reality, and exaggerating a little, abstract expressionism did nothing but enlarge pieces of Cézanne and Van Gogh."

He does in painting what a composer would do in music. He detests, though, the sense of sight exercising a strange tyranny that doesn't seem to affect the sense of hearing.

"You can make a musical composition, give it the title Moonlight, and nobody looks for the Moon, or the stars, or the light anywhere," he observes. "Now, paint a picture and put Moonlight below it, and you'll see how everyone comes looking for the Moon and the stars. I'm amazed by what people see in my paintings, and I have nothing against that; but I don't want them to think that I painted what they see."

He abhorred titles. If it weren't for the gallery owners, he says, he would never put titles on his works.

More than once he said that black is a color like any other, and that's why he used it profusely. When asked if that attitude was related to a desire to vindicate those who, like him, have black skin, he responded that it wasn't; that he did it for simple pictorial convenience. The fact that he had sometimes used forms that resemble Yoruba signs doesn't stem from knowledge of Afro-Cuban religions, he assures, whose rituals he came to know in Havana when he was already over 20 years old.

"The circle, the cross, and the arrow come from caves, and don't necessarily have to do with Yoruba," Llinás clarified. "But of course: if you're Black and Cuban, you have to be Yoruba. I'm a Black Cuban and I can't dance. What can I do about it!"

Among all his generational peers, Llinás was the one who continued painting until the end with the greatest fidelity to a language of aesthetic rupture.

His recognition as a master of abstract expressionism came in the sixties, after presenting his works in numerous exhibitions on the Island and abroad.

In 1997, Florida International University presented a retrospective of his work, and in 2004, Miami-Dade College exhibited an exhibition of his prints and wood carvings.

Llinás died on July 4 in a Parisian hospital where he was admitted in irreversible coma after suffering an accident in early June 2005.