Caspian Azarmi is an artist based in Cornwall whose practice moves fluidly between figurative oil painting and experimental printmaking. Working across these mediums allows Caspian to break from traditional painterly conventions, embracing tactile, layered processes that carry a strong emotional charge and invite close, bodily engagement.

Caspian’s visual language is shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the Classical Masters, drawn especially to their dark, theatrical, and erotically charged compositions. Within these influences, the work probes the uneasy space where beauty and eroticism collide, exploring how pain, ecstasy, and desire coexist. Rather than resisting suffering, Caspian seeks the beauty embedded within it.

At the core of his practice is a queering of historical imagery. By re-examining canonical paintings through a queer lens, Caspian challenges inherited narratives of love, lust, grief, and torture, reclaiming them as sites of both personal reflection and collective resonance. These themes echo lived queer experiences, where intimacy and vulnerability are often entwined with longing, loss, and resilience. 

Through his experimental print processes, Caspian employs repetition, distortion, and fragmentation as conceptual strategies, allowing images to erode, shift, and re-form. This instability reflects the fluid nature of identity and memory, and the ongoing process of becoming—offering works that are intimate, unsettling, and tender, while insisting on the presence of beauty within darkness.