Becoming Landscape, the second solo exhibition with the gallery by Cuban-American artist Marlon Portales, featuring new paintings that explore the intimate relationship between the human body and the natural world. Proposing that the body is itself a landscape, the exhibition considers identity as a state of perpetual metamorphosis, shaped by memory, migration, and the places we inhabit, leave behind, or reconstruct through imagination.

At the heart of the exhibition is the human figure, depicted in moments of contemplation, vulnerability, desire, and transcendence. Solitary and gathered bodies inhabit lush, dreamlike environments where the boundaries between figure and landscape begin to dissolve. Nature is neither passive nor merely a backdrop; it becomes an extension of the body, just as the body becomes an extension of the natural world. These encounters suggest a fluid relationship between the physical and spiritual, the internal and external.

Migration and displacement inform Portales’s exploration of belonging. His experience leaving Cuba has shaped his understanding of landscape, revealing how places persist within us even as they are altered by distance, time, and memory. Drawing from lived experiences, dreams, and imagined environments, his paintings evoke spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and impossible to locate. These psychological landscapes exist beyond fixed narratives, where memory and imagination converge

11. 30 – 01. 09. 2027

Spinello Projects
2930 NW 7 Ave, Wynwood
spinelloprojects.com