Armando Mariño

Some recent solo exhibitions
PanAmerican Art Projects Miami 2009, 'Drilling America'
Galeria Fernando Pradilla, Madrid 2007, 'Interiores'
Galerie Hof & Huyser, Amsterdam 2006
Museo Cruz Herrera, Cádiz 2002, 'Arte en la Venas'

Some recent group exhibitions
Museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo 2008, 'Something and Something Else'
John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, 2007, 'Cuba Avant-Garde'
VIII Bienal de la Habana, Havana 2004

Selected publications
ARCO special: a retrospective of Madrid's international contemporary art fair, Madrid: ARCO 2004
Inside/Outside: Contemporary Cuban Art, Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University 2003

Selected public and corporate collections
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, CU • Virginia University Art Museum, Charleston, US • ASU Art Museum, Tempe, US • Berardo Museum – Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, Lisbon, PT • Espacio C. Camargo, Cantabria, ES • Fundación Marcelino Botin, Santander, ES • Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, ES • Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporaneo, Badajoz, ES • National Museum of Valjevo, RS

Armando Mariño makes paintings, drawings and installations using an ironic, clear visual language. The eye-catching, brightly coloured scenes of smoking rubble and ruins epitomize the horrors and chaos in the world. Some of Mariño's latest paintings represent monumental remains, which appear as their own mausoleums; silent reminders of a prominent past. This silence is the reverse of what happens before the act of representation: the blast caused by the violence, either natural or civilized. Silence symbolizes, then, its opposite: the yells previous to the first press photo. In that sense, the double translation of reality – from the event to the digital media and from there to the canvas – expresses an inversion of the values of the language of the news media. This inversion happens when a press photo is digitally manipulated, is broken up in the pictorial language, swells in the eternity of the canvas and is shut away in the art gallery. Mariño plays with the symbolic status of painting and his ability to simultaneously minimize and magnify the human drama.

Armando Mariño was resident artist at the Rijksakademie in 2004-2005.

www.armandomarino.com