Novo's material here is the most reproduced object in Cuba's civic landscape: the José Martí bust modeled by Juan José Sicre, cast in quantity and installed in nearly every school, state workplace, park, and public building on the island. Working from a cast pulled from the surviving original molds, the artist set the bust before a fixed camera in a Havana gallery and painted it, roughly ten coats a day for a month, until 382 layers of gesso had accumulated. Every layer was photographed. The 382 exposures run as a stop-motion sequence that compresses the month into a continuous act of effacement, the features thickening, softening, and finally sealing over, leaving a head still recognizably Martí in profile but drained of face.

The procedure is borrowed rather than invented. Cuban institutions repaint their Martí busts white for each anniversary of his birth and of the Revolution, so the objects accumulate their own erasure at a rate of a coat or two a year as an act of maintenance and reverence. Novo, watching this as a child, asked what a century of upkeep would leave behind, and the work is the answer given at speed: what the state does across a hundred years, done in thirty days. The result is a portrait of a national hero buried under the labor of honoring him, and a fairly exact object lesson in how veneration operates as suppression.

The argument extends past the object. Martí is the figure through which the Cuban state authorizes itself, his writing lifted from context and rebuilt into ideological instrument, so the accreted white surface reads as a physical record of that use: the thinker preserved as a shape and voided as a mind. The title supplied the name of Novo's final exhibition in Cuba, at El Apartamento in Havana in 2020, shortly before he relocated to Houston. The bust has since been shown against the Martí of Juan Francisco Elso's Por América at El Museo del Barrio, one 1980s Martí facing one from 2020, and the monumental restatement of the work, milled from a 3D scan of the painted bust, took the Pommery Prize at the Armory Show's Platform section in 2022.