Marco Arias

Marco Arias is a Chilean London-based visual artist and musician whose practice interweaves Latin American cultural identity with globalised imagery, exploring the emotional and psychological terrain between personal memory and mass media. Working primarily in painting, but also across sculpture, video, and installation, Arias builds an evolving archive drawn from daily life—sketchbooks, voice notes, photographs, and screenshots—that serves as a foundation for his multifaceted creative process.

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For Arias, painting and music are not separate disciplines but twin expressions of a single inner drive. “I’m always sketching, always recording melodies,” he explains. “There’s a constant need to bring thought and feeling into a tangible dimension.” Though their outputs differ, the energy behind both acts is the same—vital, cathartic, and necessary. Painting becomes a conceptual response to the world, while music flows outward as a more intimate, emotional release. When one practice rests, the other awakens, creating a dynamic balance that sustains his artistic life.

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This duality is not without its challenges. Arias reflects on the intensity of maintaining such a cycle: “It can be overwhelming. I have to manage both forces while still acknowledging a third presence—myself without them.” His work often turns inward, confronting vulnerability head-on. He notes the difficulty of sharing deeply personal visual works, particularly on social media, where the context often feels too fragmented to hold the full weight of the ideas. In contrast, music, veiled in melody and persona, offers a protective layer that makes exposure feel safer.

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Over time, Arias has begun bridging the gap between his visual and musical practices. Recurring symbols, images, and ideas appear across songs and paintings, leaving what he calls “Easter eggs” that speak to one another across mediums. Whether sketching in a notebook or recording fragments of lyrics while walking through the city, he treats both drawing and songwriting as intuitive extensions of thought—direct, spontaneous, and fluid.

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Ultimately, Arias’s work stands as a testament to the power of the creative act as both mirror and release. Through the interplay of sound and image, interiority and commentary, he crafts a practice that is not only about self-expression but about listening closely—to himself, to his surroundings, and to the subtle rhythm where both artforms meet.

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​www.heymarcoarias.com

Instagram: @heymarcoarias

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