LONDON.- Coates and Scarry announce the first solo show by Cuban painter Armando Mariño on view at Gallery 8 in London. 

The artist’s large scale works in New Paintings are rooted within the stories of migration that many have undertaken - enormous and dangerous journeys made across land and sea.

Drawing from his Cuban roots, Armando Mariño’s work is influenced by periods of time living in Cuba, the Netherlands, France and New York’s Hudson Valley, and his experience of dislocation and popular culture.

The places and people embedded within the works are suffused with social and political significance. Using imagery taken from his own photographs as well as external sources, the artist’s works connect to one of the most pressing issues of our world today.

The artist’s use of reflections on seas and lakes, tiny droplets of water, sparkles of light and figures that are most frequently depicted alone, give works such as The Wanderer and The Sea Walker (both 2016) an appearance reminiscent of a half-remembered memory or dream.

Armando Mariño’s paintings are characterised by his distinctive and highly saturated colour palette – bright pinks, oranges, greens and yellows that are offset by deep, dark shadows. Despite the traditional medium, Mariño likens the hues he works with to those that can be found in films, video games and advertising – super-saturated digital colours that fizz and pop, connecting to our contemporary way of viewing the world. Colour is essential to the work, indeed, Mariño has described painting as an idea that uses colour in order to communicate.

Each of Mariño’s finished canvases begins with a number of paintings on paper. In oil and watercolour, these studies are the places where the artist’s ideas first come to life – where the composition, colour and surface details are worked out and eventually fixed down. The works on paper are a crucial part of Mariño’s research process as well as being important parts of his wider practice in their own right. The artists then builds up each of his paintings with multiple layers of oil paint. Each begin with a foundation of cadmium yellow or orange, painstakingly layered until vibrancy is achieved.

Armando Mariño was born in Cuba and now lives and works in New York. He studied art in Havana and Santiago de Cuba in the 1980s and 1990s, and at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam between 2004 and 2005. He has since exhibited his paintings all over the world including solo and group exhibitions in Paris, Ontario, Copenhagen, Madrid and Miami among other cities. Mariño has won numerous awards for his paintings and his work is held in such notable collections as that of Deutsche Bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, The Coca Cola Foundation and other significant public and private collections in Europe, Central America and the USA.
   
Armando Mariño is presented by Coates and Scarry at Gallery 8, 8 Duke Street St James, London from Tuesday 4th October 2016 until Saturday 15 October 2016