Felipe Linares Vargas

Afternoons after secondary school

Felipe Linares Vargas remembers that, after secondary school, he would arrive at the workshop and sit beside his father, Felipe Linares Mendoza, in the very spot where he works today. He was given small tasks: “help me whiten, help me decorate”. He devoted himself, he says, “to watching and doing it”. He finished a degree in programming, but could not see himself in an office.

“I was more drawn to being here with my father because here I expressed my creativity.”

Felipe Linares Vargas, video testimony (family archive; translated)

He began, he says, with heads; then with the figures the family makes for the fireworks makers; then his father let him make an alebrije.

Barbas: a story turned into an alebrije

One day a little rooster walked into the house, climbed the stairs and stayed as a pet. His father named it Barbas, and the rooster followed him everywhere. Later Felipe wanted to turn that memory into an alebrije: “I’m going to make a little rooster like Barbas”. While he wondered what head to give it, his father suggested a lion’s, “so it looks strong, imposing”. Barbas ended up as a collaboration between the two.

“As a rule my father and I are a little more closely tied, to work together.”

Felipe Linares Vargas, video testimony (family archive; translated)

A craft of his own

Felipe belongs to the generation that grew up among Holy Week Judas figures, November skeletons and year-round alebrijes, and that today works in independent workshops. A small alebrije, he explains, takes fifteen to twenty days; a large one, a month or more.

“Cartonería, being so malleable, can be handled in different ways… The limit, I think, is the one you set yourself.”

Felipe Linares Vargas, video testimony (family archive; translated)

From his father he acknowledges the fine work, the movement and the meticulous painting; in his own pieces that lesson is recognizable at once: jaguar spots, scales, wing veins and dots of different sizes, resolved with a brush.

Work in collections and exhibitions

The Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares holds “Tzompantli” (2010), a work of molded, modeled and polychromed cardboard measuring 122 × 104 × 20 centimeters, included in the digital story “The Festival of Death in Mexico” that the museum published on Google Arts & Culture.

In 2026 a rooster alebrije of his is part of “Alebrijes: A Linares Family Tradition”, the Museum of International Folk Art’s traveling exhibition that opened on May 5, 2026 at the Consulate of Mexico in Albuquerque, with venues announced through 2028.

The works photographed for the previous version of this site, which was devoted to him, remain under his name with the degree of attribution stated on each record.