Marlon Portales
Bio
Marlon Portales lives and works in Havana.
Education
2018 – Degree in Visual Arts. Superior Institute of Art(ISA).Havana. Cuba.
2010 – Bachelor in Visual Arts (Professional Academy of Visual Arts Tiburcio Lorenzo. Pinar del Río, Cuba).
Residencies
2018 / The Fountainhead Residency. Miami, Florida, USA.
2016 / Residency Illy& UNIDEE (Unmaking: Subverting The Every-Day). Cittadellarte-FundazionePistoletto. Biella, Italy.
2015 / Residency Art OMI. OMI International Art Center. Columbia, Nueva York, USA.
Solo Shows
2019 - "The Voyeur". 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York, USA.
2018 - “Museum”.Origenes Gallery, Gran Teatro de La Habana Alicia Alonso, Havana, Cuba.
Statement
The series Repost (2020) is one of my most pleasant and free visual and mental exercises. It originates from the exploration of Instagram as a visual platform, I am an image devourer. I enter an infinite universe of visualities in search of a motif for my painting, sensorially speaking.
The gesture consists in selecting an image that awakens in me some kind of connection (Aesthetic, poetic, spiritual, sexual, philosophical, political...) and I try to make a quick reproduction of it with the technique of oil on the back of an unprimed canvas, mounted on a frame. The pigment works its magic and passes through the canvas towards the front, like a remnant or residue that remains in the intention of apprehending that image, of making it mine. It is an unpredictable process in which the final result escapes my control as an artist to become a becoming of the painting itself.
