No Vacancy: Marlon Portales, Busco en El Monte Amparo

Titled Busco en El Monte Amparo, after a verse by Cuban poet José Martí, this installation brings together two monumental paintings exploring identity, migration, memory, and belonging. The works consider how identity is shaped by the places we inhabit, the memories we carry, and experiences of displacement and uprooting. Female Gaze presents a transformed body through the superimposition of a male portrait onto a female figure, suggesting identity as a process of becoming. Opposite it, El Monte evokes the Cuban countryside through memory, imagining a landscape that does not exist, but emerges as an idealized psychological and spiritual territory where ancestry, longing, and belonging converge. Together, the paintings create a passage between body and landscape. Within Miami Beach, the installation invites viewers to enter an imagined place of refuge, a moment of amparo, or shelter, amid displacement and the rhythms of contemporary life. Marlon Portales is a Cuban artist born in 1991 in Pinar del Río, Cuba, and based in Miami. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana. His practice, centered on painting and installation, explores identity, masculinity, gender, migration, and transformation through figurative and symbolic narratives. Portales has presented solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries in the United States and Cuba, including Wild Nature at The Armory Show, New York (2025), The Last Man at Spinello Projects, Miami (2024), Poems of Nature at Pan American Art Projects, Miami (2023), and The Voyeur at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York (2019). His work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the permanent collection of El Espacio 23, Miami. He has participated in residencies including Art OMI, Fondazione Pistoletto, and Fountainhead. He is represented by Spinello Projects, Miami.