Guido Llinás: the Incredible Story of an Afro-Cuban Artist in Paris

In Paris, Llinás experimented with Anaforuana, a Nigerian sign system. His work then evolved to integrate signs and textile patterns, creating a unique abstract visual language. Llinás’ paintings are marked by complex layers and cultural memory, demonstrating early on the critical potential of Caribbean artists.

by Estelle Nabeyrat, Christoph Singler

Wed 4 Sep, 2024

Cuba

While abstract painting by Black artists has long been on the margins, Guido Llinás’ work (1923, Cuba – 2005, France) showed early on its critical potential. When Llinás arrived in Paris in 1963 at the age of 40, he already had a successful career in Cuba as the leading voice of Los Once, an internationally renowned avant-garde group that included Antonio Vidal, Raúl Martínez, and Agustín Cárdenas. Llinás left Cuba due to his opposition to the sovietization of the country cultural politics. He had more reasons to leave the island: his homosexuality, and furthermore, the dissolution of Afro-Cuban societies by the government, which were the only institutions where Black Cubans were able to self-organize since the massacre of Afro-cuban members of Partido Independiente de Color at the beginning of the 20th century.

Once in Paris, Llinás began to paint Anaforuana, a sign system of Nigerian origins. During the first years he experimented with a blend of Action Painting and these signs, consisting mainly of circles, crosses, triangles, ovals, diamond shapes and arrows. Llinás was not a believer: to him, these signs were the African equivalent of Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane, a basic text on geometric abstraction. Gradually, these signs began to appear in his work around 1965. A complex layering of dark strokes reveals parts of the Anaforuana, often in white. It’s difficult to say whether they are emerging or being erased. This ambiguity speaks to themes of visibility, and addresses memory — cultural, personal, historical —, its fragmentation, and persistence. Soon after, these signs emerged more prominently t when Llinás encountered Lettrism, a movement insisting on the profusion of the alphabetic sign, which he replaced with its African counterpart.

Guido Llinas, Painting, oil on burlap, 1996. Photo: Christoph Singler

Most of Llinás’ paintings can be read as a palimpsest, an interplay of different cultural modes between writing/figuring, memory and imagination.

In 1966, Llinás comments on the exhibition, part of Dakar Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, that traveled to Paris (Cuba did not participate). He soon began exploring other sign languages present on the African continent, gradually integrating them into his work, in particular textile patterns. The Sign slowly began to shift into Form, moving away from its original meaning. Fragmentation was no longer just a symptom of destruction: it became the starting point for the creation of a new language. The signs never fully disappeared, as part of them would return , unpredictably, akin to Proustian involuntary memory. Most of Llinás’ paintings can be read as a palimpsest, an interplay of different cultural modes between writing/figuring, memory and imagination.

In Cuba, Llinás had painted several murals. His Parisian period transposed this practice to a smaller scale. In the 1950s décollage artists like Villeglé, Rotella, and Hains tore billboards from the streets and brought them into the gallery space, opening new possibilities for Llinás’ work. The billboards he collected carried the memory of the streets – visibly fragmented yet entering a new life as his “Black Signature” (Severo Sarduy) appropriated and transformed them. Different regimes of signs, color codes, and ways of signifying were put into dialogue, breaking down hierarchies between them. Llinás’ work is profoundly diasporic, self-affirming while sharing the fragility of graffiti and tags. In an unpublished statement, he once wrote: ”(My) canvases give way to indignation at the ravages of time, injustice and death […] this is why my painting does not worship harmony. Form is unpredictable; it may well be a false balance that obscures the flash my work intends to spark. On these premises, the act of painting, in insoluble contradiction with the aspiration for justice, becomes necessarily a song about the fury of life, an act of insubordination”.

Guido Llinás’ works will be featured in a major group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, in 2025.

Guido Llinás (1923–2005) was born in Cuba, where he founded Los Once (1953), an avant-garde group that introduced abstract expressionism. In 1963, he settled in Paris, where he began his Black Paintings, focusing on different sign systems of African origin. He primarily worked with oil painting and wood engraving and was a pioneer in Latin American Art for his collages, a practice he had begun during his Cuban period.

Estelle Nabeyrat is an art critic and curator, tutoring at ENS-Paris-Saclay in the Design department She researched artists in exile in Latin America and the Caribbean with the support of a CNAP-Paris grant.

Christoph Singler is a professor emeritus of Latin American literatures and arts at Université de Franche-Comté, France. His research areas include Caribbean literatures and the visual arts of the Black Atlantic, with a particular interest in Cuban and diasporic arts, transculturality, the relationship between anthropology and aesthetics, as well as image-text relations. He is the author of Génesis de la Pintura Negra. La obra parisina de Guido Llinás (2013).

Cuba