Marcel Diogo constructs a figurative poetics that articulates memory and social critique to explore the tensions between presence and erasure in the context of Brazil’s historical violences. In his paintings, objects, and installations, the artist invests in the image as a field of symbolic and political elaboration—where spirituality, denunciation, and reinvention overlap. His pictorial practice, marked by charged atmospheres, symbolic density, and rigorous composition, combines references from Baroque tradition, vanitas, and historical portraiture with everyday elements and Afro-Brazilian figures. By representing bodies at rest, common objects, or portraits of Black personalities, Marcel constructs scenes traversed by the ambiguous suspension between silence and resistance, finitude and enchantment. In the friction between the dreamlike and the political, his work claims the sharing of the gaze as a structuring force of collective memory and imagination—evoking a sensitive "MetaQuilombo" where different traditions, narratives, and Black presences coexist and interconnect.

His solo exhibitions include: “Carinhosa-Cafuné MetaQuilombo” (2022, Mitre Galeria, Belo Horizonte – Brazil) and “Sobre a pele do pano” (2023, FAE-UFMG, Belo Horizonte – Brazil). He has participated in important group exhibitions such as: “Encruzilhadas da Arte Afro-Brasileira” (2024, CCBB, São Paulo – Brazil), “Quarto Ato - O Quilombismo: Documentos de uma Militância Pan-Africanista” (Inhotim, Brumadinho – Brazil), “Direito à Forma” (Inhotim, Brumadinho – Brazil), “Dos Brasis” (2023, Sesc Belenzinho, São Paulo – Brazil), “Carolina Maria de Jesus - Um Brasil para os Brasileiros” (IMS, São Paulo – SP), “I Circuito Latino-Americano de Arte Contemporânea” (CCMQ, Porto Alegre – RS), “Imagens que não se Conformam” (IHGB at MMGV, Belo Horizonte – MG), and “FUNK, um grito de ousadia e liberdade” (MAR, Rio de Janeiro – RJ).