The Waste Land

This solo show features new oil on canvas paintings and works on paper. The title of the show refers immediately to the T.S Eliot poem, but the paintings that Marino shows are far from an illustration of it. In these paintings the artist recognizes the poem as a background to his work. “It helped me put together all the paintings,” he said. “The style of the poem overall is marked by hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts, like my paintings.”

If the subject of his previous show was the mass protests, revolution, and tumult of last year, the artist is now more focused on the contradiction and friction between spirituality and the chaotic world we live in. The imagery in his paintings come from different sources: two Tibetan monks, a holy man from India, and a Western landscape in autumn are some of the images that serve as material for the new show.
Marino employs photos taken from magazines, web sites or books, which he crops, edits and transforms to create a new narrative or history that matches his interests. The result are large-scale paintings, colorful and intense, classic and obscure; “highbrow” and “low-brow” layered ad infintum, so that the viewer has to look closely to discover it all.
Marino is one of the most prominent Cuban artists from his generation. He has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries in Europe and USA.

In 2010 Marino moved to New York from Madrid for one year as part of the ISCP Brooklyn. That year he also participated in the exhibition Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art at the Mattress Factory Museum Pittsburgh.
Between 2010 and 2012, his work drew the attention of critics and curators in the U.S., prompting invitations to participate in exhibitions, such as El Museo del Barrio’s Biennial (S) Files (2011) and Building Identities: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection, presented in the Cleveland Clinic’s Art Program of the Arts & Medicine Institute. In addition to an Artist’s Studio residency at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2011-12), Marino was awarded a The Pollock Krasner Grant that year.
Marino’s work is held by many private and public collections, such as The Donald and Shelley Rubin Collection, the Deutsche Bank Collection U.S., The Berardo Collection Portugal, The Farber Collection U.S., The Netherland Bank Holland, the National Museum of Fine Art Cuba, and The Coca Cola Foundation Spain, among others. Marino’s first solo show in New York, Recent Paintings From the Year of the Protester, took place in the nonprofit space The 8 Floor, with the support of the Rubin Foundation and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. This show prompted invitations to participate in Project V at the Hudson Valley Contemporary Art Center in Peekskill in 2012/2013, and Skyline Adrift Cuban Art and Architecture at Art Omi in Ghent, New York (September 2012-spring 2013).
The Waste Land is Marino’s first solo gallery show in New York City.