Cuban-American · Contemporary figurative painting · Magical realism
Reynier Llanes
b. 1985, Pinar del Río, Cuba
Reynier Llanes (born 1985) is a Cuban-born painter based in Florida whose dreamlike oils show ordinary people beside transparent figures, floating objects and visible emotions. His painting Stay shows a girl reaching toward a dissolving, glass-like man.
1 work in the collection
Works by Reynier Llanes
Reynier Llanes is a Cuban-born painter, born in Pinar del Río in 1985, who has lived and worked in the American South since 2007. His paintings are quiet scenes of people, often children, in which feelings and memories take visible form: transparent bodies, drifting flowers, bubbles and small planets scattered across textured skies. Critics and galleries often describe the work as magical realism.
Life in brief
Llanes graduated from the art school in Pinar del Río in 2004, where he was tutored by the Cuban realist painter Juan Miguel Suárez, and moved to Havana in 2005 to continue studying and working. He left Cuba in 2007 and settled first in Naples, Florida. In 2009 he became an artist in residence at Jonathan Green Studios in Charleston, South Carolina, and in 2011 a work of his won a purchase award at the MOJA Arts Festival and entered the City of Charleston's collection. In 2012 the magazine Oxford American named him one of the "New Superstars of Southern Art." He later moved with his family to Miami. His work has been shown at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston and in a 2022 solo exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.
Style and technique
Llanes paints in oil, usually with a richly built-up surface, and also works in watercolor and coffee on paper. Figures are drawn with academic care, but placed in spaces that feel half real: a balustrade that opens onto a sea of shells and petals, a sky full of tiny worlds. Recurring motifs include translucent people, dissolving at the edges, who stand for absence, memory or love.
Stay
Stay is his most searched painting. A girl in a pale pink dress, seen from behind, stands at a white stone balustrade and reaches toward a man made of something like glass or water, through whom the balusters and the sky can be seen; her fingertips stop just short of him. The title reads as a plea to someone who is leaving or already gone. The work has been dated to around 2022. Similar images of love that outlasts presence appear in Ghost in the Mirror and The Kiss of Death.
Where to see his work
Llanes's paintings are shown through galleries in the American South and are held in private collections and in public collections including the City of Charleston's. See more in Death in Art.
Questions & answers
What is Stay by Reynier Llanes about?
Stay shows a girl in a pink dress at a stone balustrade, reaching toward a transparent man whose body seems made of glass or water. It is widely read as an image of longing for someone lost, through death or separation, who is still present in memory.
Who is Reynier Llanes?
Reynier Llanes is a painter born in Pinar del Río, Cuba, in 1985 who emigrated to the United States in 2007. Based in Florida, he paints dreamlike, magical-realist scenes and was named a 'New Superstar of Southern Art' by Oxford American in 2012.
What are Reynier Llanes's paintings like?
His paintings are figurative oils, often with thickly textured surfaces, in which emotions and memories appear as transparent figures, flowers, bubbles and floating planets. He also works in watercolor and coffee on paper.