The Armory Show 2025 - Wild Nature
Spinello Projects is proud to present Wild Nature, the debut solo booth presentation by Cuban-born artist Marlon Portales at The Armory Show 2025. Following his acclaimed solo exhibition The Last Man, Portales deepens his exploration of identity, desire, and transformation, expanding into a symbolic terrain where landscape mirrors the human condition.
"Portraiture becomes a way of looking outward, while landscape becomes a way of looking inward." – Marlon Portales
Over the past two years, Marlon Portales’ practice has shifted toward a more intuitive, spiritual, and liberated form of painting. In Wild Nature, this evolution takes shape as a symbolic landscape—lush, unruly, and alive within us. His dreamlike scenes depict jungles, bodies tangled in undergrowth, seductive armor, and impossible gardens, where figures emerge from or dissolve into their surroundings. These beings exist in states of metamorphosis, blurring boundaries between human, animal, vegetal, and spiritual
Themes in Wild Nature
The exhibition is guided by three thematic constellations. Nocturnal Visions presents dreamlike scenes where transformation unfolds in shadow and mystery. Fragmented Narratives evoke identities that are layered, unfinished, and open to interpretation. Finally, Bodies in Landscape depicts human and vegetal forms entwined, dissolving the boundary between body and environment.
Artistic Language
Portales reveres art history, poetry, cinema, and popular culture. His influences—from Pre-Raphaelite painting to the aesthetics of social media—merge into a vibrant painterly language. With brushwork that feels urgent and alive, he creates paintings in motion: open-ended visions that celebrate ambiguity, fragility, and metamorphosis.
