Leonardo Linares Vargas

Learning by playing

Leonardo Linares Vargas was born around 1968 in Mexico City, into the family the city already identified with paper and cardboard. He learned, he says, by playing: watching his father and grandfather make figures and imitating them with paste and newspaper.

“Here the only thing forbidden was to forbid, and that is how you teach yourself, how you take shape little by little.”

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

From his father, Felipe Linares Mendoza, he acknowledges having learned “fine work”, and he is still amazed by the skill with which he paints. According to the “En Calavera” catalogue, in 1986, at eighteen, he received a national youth award for folk art and already saw teaching cartonería as his responsibility.

With his father in Paris

In 1989 he took part, with his father and his brother David, in “Magiciens de la Terre”, Jean-Hubert Martin’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. The same year he spoke of alebrijes as personal expression on “El mundo de papel de la familia Linares”, a Radio Educación program. The Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares holds his “Niño con calaverita” (1992), made with brown paper, kraft paper, cardboard rolls, paste and acrylic. Fomento Cultural Banamex counts him, with his father, among the Grandes Maestros del Arte Popular.

Paper only

Leonardo has explained his workshop’s rule on materials clearly: anything that is paper is allowed; anything that is not paper is not.

“You have to make everything completely, at least in our workshop, within the paper-and-cardboard technique, with newspaper, manila paper, tissue paper, kraft paper, minagris paper, all the materials that are paper.”

Leonardo Linares Vargas, interview with Capital 21 (2023; translated)

No polystyrene, no plastics, no fabrics, no glass eyes. The paints are acrylic; the varnish, he says, the workshop prepares itself with a formula it has had for years. The result he seeks he describes in three words: more movement, more looseness, more dynamism.

The family’s public voice

In October 2019, at the start of the monumental alebrije parade, he announced the declaration of alebrijes as cultural heritage of Mexico City. He has been interviewed by Siempre! (2020), Capital 21 (2023) and La Jornada (2026), and he is the one who explains to the press how the family is organized into independent workshops. In 2014 he was on the artist list of “Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum; in 2023 he painted alebrijes in public and spoke with curator Marta Turok at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, where his pieces were part of “La Cartonería Mexicana”.

Between 2025 and 2026, monumental fiberglass reproductions based on two of his alebrijes, “Lionbull” and “Catbird”, toured public spaces in the United States. In 2026 his cat alebrije is part of “Alebrijes: A Linares Family Tradition”, the Museum of International Folk Art’s traveling exhibition, and on October 15, 2026 he received the Artisanal Career Award at the Gran Premio Nacional de Arte Popular ceremony.

What he remembers of his grandfather

Leonardo is also the family’s public memory. He is the source of the recollections of a Mexican art exhibition in Paris in 1952 that may have included his grandfather’s alebrijes, of the Judas figures and athletes of 1968, and of Pedro Linares’s meeting with the Oaxacan carver Manuel Jiménez in 1978. This site records them as testimony and notes which ones also have documentary support.