Like most kids, Christian Sarmiento fell in love with drawing and painting, as a way of expressing himself and in order to make sense of the world that surrounded him. But unlike other kids, he kept on drawing.

Born in a family of musicians, writers and story tellers, he would spend most of his vacations surrounded by the cartoonists at the local newspaper, where his aunt worked. The smell of the paper, the freshly sharpened pencils and the frenetic look of a coffee fueled cartoonist trying to meet a deadline, would be imprinted forever in his memory.

While a teenager, he studied the renaissance and decided that he was not going to consume his life in one field of knowledge and, with the financial and emotional help of his mother, he studied the fields of engineering, philosophy and the social sciences, as well as the ancient crafts of tattooing and oil painting.

These fields of study have allowed him to add more depth to his work, which serves as social commentary, while making use of philosophical questions regarding gender, culture and technology.

Today, Christian Sarmiento’s body lives in his natal city of Barranquilla, Colombia, while the rest of him travels the internet by the alias of Henry James, in an attempt  to materialize thought through a stream of binary code.

Statement

I paint because it allows me to communicate on a different level; it allows me to speak the more universal language of color, and form, therefore allowing me to explore the world without linguistic constraints.

My aim is to provoke an emotional response outside the realm of reason, and I achieve this by painting my anxieties, my fetishes, my dreams and the byproducts of the culture I’ve come to call ‘my own’.