Carlos Marcial (b. 1984) is a Mexico City-born digital artist raised in Puerto Rico whose work reworks compositions by Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer and René Magritte alongside pre-Columbian symbols like the jaguar and the serpent.,,He discovered Bitcoin in 2012, discovered NFTs in 2019 while running a design studio in Toronto, and became a full-time crypto artist in early 2020.,
Marcial has said NFTs let artists in the Global South, and in Mexico City in particular, reach collectors directly rather than depend on New York galleries and auction houses. By 2022 his work had sold for seven figures in total, a shift he has described as moving from an artist who avoids the market to one who is “the platform”.
In 2019 Marcial made Co-lambo 02 - All that is solid melts into air, depicting a melting Lamborghini, and sold it as an NFT on SuperRare in 2020 for 0.2 ETH, about $28 at the time. Marcial became known as an outspoken advocate for NFTs' ability to help artists support themselves. In 2022 Lamborghini alleged that the piece infringed its copyright.
In 2023 Sotheby's auctioned The Work of Art as an Algorithmic Aesthetic System, a 1/1 interactive piece whose code generates a new variation each time a viewer clicks or refreshes it. The piece reflects Marcial's move into algorithmic and generative art, extending his long-standing interest in the relationship between digital art, technology and art history from a Latin American and Caribbean perspective.
