Stay

Stay is a recent oil painting by Reynier Llanes, a Cuban-born painter who settled in Florida and has exhibited widely at museums in the American South. Llanes is known for dreamlike, narrative pictures in which ordinary figures meet visible emotions, ghosts and floating, symbolic objects, painted in thick, textured oil and sometimes in watercolor and coffee. Older pages on this site date Stay to 2022; its dimensions and current owner are not published.

What you're looking at

A girl with long dark hair, seen from behind, stands at a white stone balustrade. She wears a pale pink, off-the-shoulder dress tied with a bow at the back, and raises one hand toward the figure beside her. That figure is a man, but he is made of nothing solid: his body is transparent, like glass or water, so the balusters and the sky show straight through him. Small yellow flowers and flecks of color are caught inside his form, and his head is a smooth, featureless bubble with only the faintest suggestion of a face.

The sky behind them is not a sky so much as a sea or a dream-space. Llanes builds it from heavily textured paint, encrusted with tiny shapes that look like shells, petals, bubbles and planets, scattered across a field of blue, green and pearly gray. The paint surface is thick throughout, so even the girl's dress has a crusted, almost sculpted quality.

The detail most viewers miss is how close the two figures are, and how they do not touch. Her fingertips stop just short of him. The gap between her hand and his chest is the emotional center of the picture.

Meaning

The title reads as a plea. The transparent man is most naturally read as someone the girl has lost, whether through death, separation or the end of a relationship, still present in memory but no longer physically there. Llanes often paints invisible feelings as visible forms, and here grief and longing take the shape of a person who is fading. The child-like figure, seen from behind, lets the viewer stand in her place.

That reading fits the title of an exhibition associated with the work, What Is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye, a line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, though we have not been able to confirm the painting's exhibition history. For other images of love outlasting death, see The Kiss of Death and Ghost in the Mirror, and the wider theme in Death in Art.