Marius Black

Marius Cornelius Arceo Funtilar was born on the 7th of June 1986 in Manila. Marius is a surrealist artist from the Philippines and is known for his artworks depicting skinless human figures depicting love and pain or Masochism. He is also known for the art styles/movements such as Elepanta & and Un-Manga (his version of indie comics). He was born a caesarian and prefers his date of birth should be the 6th of June.

Marius is also an independent comic book artist known as Anonynmous?. He has multiple personalities and uses and conjures different personas to create different themes of stories and artworks for comics and short stories. Lucifer Ulrich (Death Trigger a novel), Satan (Satanhigh comic book series), Angel(Clowder comic book series), just to name a few.

Marius is also known for human figures with elephant heads which he calls Elepanta. These artworks are usually depicted with merged artworks from known masters like Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper and Gustav Klimt's The Virgin.

His current works are of Book Vandalism, a controversial art style where he draws over photographs and artworks on books. Treating any kind of book as a children's coloring book where one can add colors and draw on them, destroying a book page to create something new.

Early Life
As a child Marius watched a lot of cartoons and movies because his father owned a movie rental store. Soon he easily got interested with cartoon and movie characters and he noticed he was imitating them through drawing. Growing up, Marius always loved reading comic books (X-men, Spider-Man, The Maxx) and some of them he lacked the next chapter to an issue. Instead of getting frustrated he tried his best by making his own comics when he was still in elementary and letting his classmates read it. Back then Marius was more interested in making comics than studying lessons from school and had always been drawing in class if the teacher didn’t mind but mostly they did and his artworks were often confiscated by them. At a young age, Marius already realized he was some kind of an artist. He didn’t know what it meant exactly but Marius knew what he was doing was some kind of an art and that he had fun and loved doing it and so he never stopped since creating anything he imagined.

"The thought of having to create something with my own two hands is amazing! Having to pluck out from my mind whatever it is I imagine and envision is truly divine." -Marius Black

Having multiple personas in his comics and in real life, Marius wanted to merge all these names and personalities into one name. He has multiple colors it seemed and remembering one point in his life as a kid he always tried mixing different kinds of colors. Whenever he mixed all the colors together it always turnined black in the end, hence creating and adapting the name Marius Black.

Education
Primary level: Espiritu Santo Parochial School 1993 - 1999

Secondary level: Espiritu Santo Parochial School 2002 - 2003

Tertiary level: University of Santo Tomas Bachelor of Fine arts 2003 - 2007

Art Style
Masochism - Skinned human figures in constant pain. This is Marius' take on how he saw the world full of pain and suffering while he was still in college after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novella Venus in Furs. His masochism artworks depicted horses, humans and even Jesus Christ as his main themes in this style. Marius was also greatly inspired by the plastination of human bodies from Body Worlds by Dr. Gunther von Hagens after seeing it in a TV program. Marius saw the world differently after that, seeing people walking around skinless and expressed it in oil painting and eventually having to reflect how he felt at the time, being in love and in pain.

Elepanta - Marius' fascination about elephants and the details and formations of their skin led him to paint Elepantas. He wanted to paint the details on the elephants trunks so he made different studies and juxtaposed them with other images he found interesting, often those images are from well known masters so that he can adapt to their style and learn how they paint along the way. He enjoyed the process of making studies and painting them and soon he made more and more elephant themed paintings and in some occasions depicting the Hindu deity Ganesha.

Book Vandalism - After college Marius worked on different non-art related jobs and some of which were starting to kill his creativity. He couldn't paint given his work load and his job then couldn't even supply him with enough money to buy the appropriate art materials. Frustrated, he decided to create art even without buying anything. He always had a lot of art books and pens with him and once thought of drawing on the book anything his imagination saw on the book page. He had at the time a book about Michelangelo's Sistine chapel, it was complete with pages of the master's sketches. He decided to "finish" or "add" art on to some of the master's works (even sculptures) printed on the book. He thought at first he might be destroying the book (his book) but quickly he realized there are other books exactly like what he has. The idea of having one's artwork on a book over preserving it (he can always buy the same book in a book store, he thought) overwhelmed him. He weighed the idea and anxious at first, took the plunge by vandalizing on it. To his surprise instead of completely destroying the image, he saw something beautiful, a new form of art. Calling it, Add Art or Book Vandalism.

Life as an artist
In high school, Marius sold comic books independently at comic book conventions. He sold Satanhigh and other one shot stories such as Someone Else's Life and the Black Rose. He also cuts opens his fingertips on comic book conventions and drips blood on his comics books as a signature.



In college he participated on a lot of art exhibitions and painting contests in and out of the school and soon his artworks were known.

Marius is also a visionary at ART FACT (Art Factory) from 2012 to present.

He is also surrealist painter / writer at BASTARDOS from 2011 to present.

And also a contributing comic book artist at KOMIKULT from 2012 to present. He is one of the co-founders of KOMIKULT which was founded on 19th of February 2012. Other than painting Marius also writes and draws independent comics and short stories and makes art videos .

Comic Lists
Here are some of Marius' Indie comics list:

One Man Show
His first solo exhibit was entitled The Venus Transit. It was about the last transit of Venus passing by the sun within our lifetime. It symbolized rebirth and new beginnings on June 6, 2012 at Kanto Artist-Run Space at the Collective in Malugay St. Makati City.

Achievements/Awards
Artist of the year, Espiritu Santo Parochial School, 2002

Finalist, Maningning Micalat Art Competition, 2004

CFAD Painting Cum laude, 2007

One man show Kanto Artist-Run Space, 2012