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The Landing is pleased to present Los Colores de Assimilation, the first exhibition of paintings by architect Leo Marmol. The exhibition will be on view November 16th through January 4th, with an opening reception on Saturday, November 16th from 6 to 9 pm. 
 
Marmol builds his abstract works on canvas with a thick application of oil paint; in addition to using brushes, Marmol employs trowels and palette knives to create emotionally charged, highly textured surfaces that call attention to their tactility. At points, the upper layers of paint  have been carefully scraped away to reveal an under-layer; the complex process used to build and unbuild these canvases contributes to the strong emotional experience of each.
 
The works in this group are primarily in red and blue, the colors of the Cuban flag; Marmol, the American-born child of Cuban parents, made the group of paintings as an exploration into what he calls his “search for heritage.”  He explains, “When I was in elementary school in the 1960’s, as a child of immigrant parents, the explicit goal was “assimilation.”  The goal at that time was to blend—to become the same as the others. To my family, this meant to stop speaking Spanish and to leave our Cuban roots behind. I was left with a feeling that I never really belonged to either culture. I was not fully of this country and I had to forget the country of my parents.”
 
The paintings in the exhibition were made over the course of thirteen years, from 2005 until 2018. The works made in 2011 and 2012—the year Marmol’s father died, and the year following—are particularly charged. Marmol’s father was a psychologist and a pastor; in the work “Darkness,” a cross-shaped figure floats on an enveloping black ground; bits of paint have been scraped away around the figure to reveal an outline of electric blue. Marmol has collaged pages from his father’s bible—replete with underlining and marginalia—into the canvases of the works “Corinthian Sky” and “Numeros;” the collaged texts are surrounded by two-toned ground built with complicated, sweeping strokes.
 
The names Marmol gives these abstracts—titles that include “Loss,” “Calm,” “Neglect,” “Floating,” “Shame,” “Stillness,” “Embrace” and “Uncertainty”—hint at the emotions that shaped their making. And though the work’s names are indicative of meaning, the works themselves are pure abstracts, with only a few flashes, throughout the grouping, of figuration. Says Marmol, “Abstraction gets to what I cannot speak easily about. I can hide behind abstraction and explore myself without complete vulnerability. There is always a secret lurking behind abstraction.”
 
Marmol’s flashes of figuration, however, are powerfully indicative of the search for heritage at work in the painter’s process. In one canvas, brothers Raul and Fidel Castro are visible, but Raul’s features have been nearly obscured, or dissolved. In another work, the shape of the island of Cuba appears twice, in red, over a background of blue and white stripes—the stripes of Cuba’s flag. In the first image, a gray arc—an arc of history, of passing time—crests cleanly across the Cuban landmass, and in the second, that arc—that history—has become messy and smudged.
 
The vibrance of the colors used in these works—and the raised, sometimes ridged and lined picture plane, as built up with many layers of oil paint—lend them a palpable energy, a striking aliveness. Something has been worked out in their making, and passionately. In all of these, something is coming to be.