Marcelo Eli Sarmiento (b. 1989, Chicago) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection of mythology, history, and contemporary existentialism. His symbolically charged paintings and drawings draw from classical iconography, religious narrative, and personal mythology, refracted through the lens of surrealism and psychological tension. Figures in his work often emerge as fractured saints, wounded heroes, beasts, and messengers — archetypes shaped by transformation, suffering, and spiritual unrest.
Sarmiento’s visual language is rooted in anthropology and art history, yet his 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 — his work questions the permanence of power, the architecture of belief, and the weight of inherited myth.
At the core of his practice is a confrontation with human finitude: mortality, violence, ecstasy, and redemption. His paintings are not nostalgic recreations, but emotional excavations — portals into the sacred, the tragic, and the unresolved. Sarmiento lives and works in Chicago.