Becoming Landscape

Spinello Projects presents 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. An important conceptual touchstone is the work of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, whose investigations into body, earth, memory, and belonging resonate throughout the exhibition. Particularly influential are the spiritual and ritual dimensions of her practice, in which the body merges with the landscape, simultaneously disappearing into the earth and leaving behind a trace of its presence. This relationship between presence and absence echoes Portales's own inquiries into displacement and the ways the body preserves the memory of its origins. Working in oil on canvas and wood panel, Portales draws upon the historical traditions of painting while cultivating a distinctly contemporary visual language. Expressive brushwork, luminous color, transparency, and the sensuality of paint animate his compositions, preserving the physical gestures of their making. Becoming Landscape dissolves the distinctions between portrait and landscape, body and nature, memory and dream. Rather than suggesting the disappearance of identity, this merging proposes an understanding of the self as fluid, evolving, and perpetually becoming. Landscape exists not only around us, but within us—in the memories we carry, the places we have left behind, and the possibilities of who we might yet become.