Marcelo Eli Sarmiento is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist (b. 1989) whose work explores the intersection of mythologies and contemporary existentialism. His symbolically charged paintings and drawings draw from classical iconography, art history, and personal mythology. Expressing the truth of his lived experience through classical frameworks, the work is filtered through the lens of expressionism and pictorial drama. Figures in his work often emerge as warriors, muses, beasts, and lovers — archetypes shaped by transformation, desire, and spiritual contemplation.
The visual language of the work is rooted in story telling and art history, yet the mark-making remains urgent and raw, prioritizing immediacy over refinement. Informed by Renaissance, medieval, and Baroque compositions — yet filtered through the expressive distortion of painters like Beckmann, Baselitz, and Bob Thompson — the work questions the permanence of power, the architecture of belief, and the weight of inherited myth.
At the core of the practice is a confrontation with human finitude: mortality, violence, ecstasy, and conviction. These paintings are not nostalgic recreations of classical narratives but emotional excavations — portals into the sacred, the tragic, and the unresolved. Sarmiento seeks to uncover his own internal battle and modes through this anthology of history and myth. Sarmiento lives and works in Chicago.