These, I, Singing in Spring: Jorge Mariño Brito Makes His Solo Debut at Mitchell Fine Art

For Jorge Mariño Brito, making art wasn’t part of the plan. The Cuban-born psychiatrist only began painting in his forties, yet his debut solo exhibition at Mitchell Fine Art, These, I, Singing in Spring, already feels like the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of stories waiting to be told.

Bringing together paintings, innovative papermaking works and printmaking, the exhibition explores memory, masculinity and human connection through figures whose relationships are deliberately left undefined. They could be lovers, brothers, friends or strangers — an ambiguity that reflects Jorge’s fascination with the many ways intimacy between men is expressed, suppressed and remembered.

Jorge in his studio (May 2026). Andrew Willis Photography.

Born in Cuba and now living and working in Brisbane, Jorge graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2024. His multidisciplinary practice combines painting, papermaking and printmaking with the sensitivity of someone who spent decades working in psychiatry, exploring vulnerability, memory and emotional connection through richly layered, tactile works.

Over a video call, Jorge gives me a tour of his home, which has become his impromptu studio. There are paintings literally everywhere: hanging on the walls, propped against them and spread across drop sheets waiting to be completed. It looks exactly how you’d imagine an artist’s workspace, except Jorge isn’t your typical artist.

He is, amongst many other things, a doctor, a psychiatrist, an immigrant and a colourblind man who only discovered art later in life.

Much of his work draws from archival military photographs, placing them alongside memories of his own childhood growing up in Cuba. The resulting paintings create a striking contrast between the warmth of family life and the trauma of living under an authoritarian regime as a young gay man during the 1990s.

“It was the most horrific experience I could have imagined,” Jorge recalls.

During mandatory military service, homosexuality was forbidden, and being discovered could mean losing access to education, employment and future opportunities.

“It was my worst nightmare if anyone found out I was gay,” he says.

Following his military service, Jorge attended medical school, where he found purpose in caring for others.

“Medicine was the one thing that spoke to the human being inside me,” he says.

In 2007, he travelled to Bolivia as part of a Cuban government medical mission, working with Indigenous communities in remote villages. It was there that an opportunity arose to defect to Chile, leaving Cuba behind and beginning a completely new chapter.

Far, Far in the Forest, 137.5×137.5cm oil on canvas (2026). Andrew Willis Photography.

“It was freedom,” he says simply.

Jorge spent the next decade in Chile, where he came out as queer and met the two great loves of his life: his now-husband and art. Together they spent countless hours visiting galleries and museums throughout South America, with Jorge imagining what it might one day feel like to create work of his own.

That opportunity didn’t arrive until 2018, after he and his husband relocated to Australia. Faced with the lengthy process of requalifying as a doctor, Jorge enrolled at the Queensland College of Art and Design, where his artistic practice began to take shape.

Although inspired by vintage military photography, Jorge became increasingly interested in what those images failed to reveal.

Working from historical photographic archives, he uncovers images of men bathing, resting and embracing — photographs often catalogued as military or social history but rarely recognised for the intimacy they reveal.

“Capturing an image on film takes an instant, yet painting gives a way to stay inside the camera,” Jorge says. “A small gesture from a photograph gets stretched across a large canvas, built up in oil, scraped back, rebuilt, until figures come forward, out of the dark, slowly, on their own terms. These paintings take time to build up, and they take time to see.”

“They’re often described as ‘boys being boys’,” he says. “But I see something more. I see tenderness. I see connection. I see these beautiful interactions that happen between men.”

Jorge in his studio (May 2026. Andrew Willis Photography.

Rather than revisiting trauma, Jorge’s paintings celebrate the softness, affection and emotional intimacy that can exist between men — something he says was commonplace within his large Latino family but often absent from broader Western depictions of masculinity.

At a time when conversations around masculinity and emotional wellbeing continue to evolve, Jorge’s work invites viewers to reconsider overlooked histories of tenderness and connection between men.

Though colourblind, his works are rich with yellows, greens and reds, tones he has learned to mix through theory and instinct.

“I don’t see colours the way you see them,” he says. “But I see my colours.”

Alongside painting, Jorge has developed an innovative papermaking technique he calls stratopulp, collecting discarded men’s clothing before pulping the fabric into fibres that are sprayed through an airbrush onto gauze. The resulting textured surfaces blur the line between paper and paint while reinforcing the central themes of memory, identity and intimacy.

By the Lake (Tarlatan Series), 220×320 cm cotton and linen fibre pulp on tarlatan (2025). Andrew Willis Photography.

“I’m exploring intimacy between men and nothing speaks more of intimacy than a second skin,” he explains. “Clothes are literally a source of the memories and stories of the men who wore them.”

Now represented by Mitchell Fine Art in Fortitude Valley, These, I, Singing in Spring marks Jorge’s first solo exhibition following his inclusion in the gallery’s Director’s Choice group exhibition earlier this year. His work has already been recognised nationally, with the artist receiving the Iain Turnbull Award from Griffith University in 2023 and being named a finalist in both the Brisbane Portrait Prize and Churchie Emerging Art Prize in 2025. His works are also held in the permanent collections of the Griffith University Art Museum and the State Library of Queensland.

“Art is a language,” he says. “You have to learn the vocabulary. It has become a way of giving a voice to the part of myself I could never express as a younger man.”