XSULLO is a digital artist known for visceral, anatomical figures whose bodies crack open, peel and merge with machinery. He decided he wanted to be an artist at age eleven, growing up in a small town near Humboldt County in Northern California, and later spent eight years as a matte painter in visual effects before returning to personal art in 2015.
Between 2007, when he moved to San Francisco, and 2015 he worked in visual effects, painting matte environments for films including James Wan's Insidious, the first season finale of Stranger Things, and Iron Man 3. In 2015 he began making personal art again, and the identity XSULLO took shape that year within the online digital art community. The resulting work synthesizes 1990s anime with the surrealism of H.R. Giger, Salvador Dalí and M.C. Escher that he had discovered as a teenager, channeled through a cyberpunk revival. He builds each piece from a 3D blockout or an AI-generated composition sketch, then illustrates over it by hand in Photoshop with thick pen brushes, a process he calls “2D bashing”.
