Wild Nature at The Armory Show

Over the past two years, Portales’ practice has evolved into a more intuitive, spiritual, and liberated form of painting. In Wild Nature, this impulse takes shape as a symbolic landscape—lush, unruly, and ever-changing—not merely external but internal, alive within us. His dreamlike scenes depict jungles, bodies tangled in undergrowth, seductive armor, and impossible gardens, where figures appear to emerge from or dissolve into their surroundings. These beings exist in states of metamorphosis, blurring the boundaries between human, animal, vegetal, and spiritual.

The works unfold across three guiding constellations: nocturnal scenes charged with mystery, seduction, and transformation; fragmented narratives that resist resolution, suggesting identities built through layers and incompletions; and naked bodies interwoven with trees and landscapes, evoking nature as a sacred, living presence. Here, Portales positions the landscape not as backdrop but as an inner force, an extension of the body itself, with roots, branches, and forests hidden within.

Portales’ reverence for art history, poetry, cinema, and popular culture flows throughout the series, drawing on sources as diverse as Pre-Raphaelite dreamscapes and the layered immediacy of social media. His brushwork is vibrant and restless, creating paintings that feel in motion—part dream, part vision, part whisper. Each canvas resists closure, offering instead an open-ended encounter that celebrates mystery, fragility, and transformation.

In Wild Nature, portraiture becomes a way of looking outward while landscape becomes a way of looking inward. Intersecting and dissolving into one another, they open a space where the human condition is mirrored by the wilderness within, a realm untamed, ambiguous, and alive.