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About The Artist
Bio
Marcelo Halmenschlager (b. 1978) is a Brazilian-American visual artist and writer. He works where recollection ferments into myth: oils and charcoal, script and seal, mysticism braided to flesh. Raised among the fog-lit ranges and Pampas of southern Brazil, Marcelo makes images that unsettle sight and invite crossing, liminal rooms where language grows teeth. Now based in Nashville, he paints, writes, and teaches, treating the studio as a site of dimensional archaeology: digging through dream, trauma, ritual, and scent to surface what wants to live again. His projects move between altar and archive, tenderness and terror, always toward transformation.
Process & Medium
Marcelo prefer natural mediums such as oils and charcoals. Oils have a natural and organic feel, and they are as versatile as his body of work. He believes oils have infinite possibilities. Charcoals are dirty and messy in a sense of execution, but they are also pure and clean as a substance, which he finds to be a contradiction. That contradiction is also a reflection of his own personality, and is represented in his work, where he goes from realism to abstract concepts and imagery.
Private Art Lessons
Halmenschlager is inspired to teach oil painting, and pass along what he has learned to those curious to learn and to develop their own ways of creation.
Upcoming Event
What if a missing Brazilian psychiatrist left behind not a novel, but a six-volume engine that quietly trains its readers to become authors in the deepest sense of the word?
THE HEXAGONAL BOX
A six-volume art literature cycle about trauma, exile, initiation, liberation, and authorship
The Hexagonal Box is a six-book hybrid series that reads like a device disguised as literature: part archive, part occult manual, part visual art cycle. Across these volumes, a vanished psychiatrist, Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel, born and trained in southern Brazil and later working in North America, leaves behind case files, drawings, psalms, and protocols that slowly reveal themselves as a long initiation into liberation, not only psychological but dimensional.
Although each volume stands alone, together they function as a single, multi-volume novel: a fractal narrative in which patients, relatives, lovers, and minor figures recur across the cycle, changing roles as the series ascends. A side character in one book may return as a central voice, a glyph, or an archetype in another, so the reader gradually realizes they have been following one expanding organism of story all along. Identities migrate, split, and recombine across volumes in the same way the series treats memory and trauma. Nothing is static. Everything is subject to reframing and reuse.
The writing moves between clinical intimacy, incantatory compression, narrative dread, and liturgical address, with the visuals functioning as evidence and ritual rather than illustration.
Each book has its own paper world, visual language, and invented literary form, and each one advances the reader along a deliberate path, from “I am the patient in the file” to “I am the one who writes the protocols that define reality.”
Automatic Writings for Automatic Drawings
Water, Dissolution
Framed as recovered materials from Dr. Schlermanlagel’s practice in Porto Alegre, this first volume pairs abstract automatic drawings with raw, clinical, and confessional texts. It introduces Alcemory, a form that lives between transcript, poem, and diagnostic note. The book reads like an open file cabinet at the edge of a continent, where trauma, compulsion, and early departures begin to surface. The reader is treated as both patient and witness. The focus is dissolution of identity: patterns named, stability lost, the first cracks in an assumed self. Several figures who later reappear in darker tales and Psalms are glimpsed here in their earliest, most human form.
Dark Poems in 100 Words
Fire, Calcination
One hundred poems, each exactly one hundred words, track a journey of exile and crossing, from rural Brazil through Central American corridors toward the United States, under the pressure of addiction, grief, and migration. Written as strict incantations, the poems burn away sentimentality, leaving a bare emotional residue. This is Hecatory, a liturgy of heat. A litmus design concept runs through the book, with color gradations that suggest psychic acidity and alkalinity. Here, the psyche is not cured. It is cooked. The reader learns to sit inside intensity and recognize it as material, not verdict. Scenes and individuals from Automatic Writings are recast as compressed flames here, then later return in altered form in the dark tales and psalms.
Dark Tales in 100 Words: The Seventh Vertex
Earth, Putrefaction
One hundred dark tales, again held to the hundred-word constraint, are paired with charcoal drawings in sacred media and treated explicitly as a device. In the book’s own language, it does not ask to be read. It operates. Titles and tales behave like switches. When read, the geometry of the collection acts on the room. Many tales echo borderlands, sanatoria, farm roads, and liminal spaces that mirror the Brazil to United States passage in uncanny form. Characters who appeared as patients or family in earlier volumes reemerge as figures in these stories, sometimes under slightly altered names, sometimes as pure archetypes. This is the moment when the archive pushes back. Horror becomes a medium for noticing that attention itself is an instrument.
Tales of the Light
Air, Transmutation
This book is the mirror and counterpoint to Dark Tales. The same archetypes return not as wounds but as instruments. Where the earlier volume named the break, Tales of the Light names the passage: counter rites, reversals, and integrations that show how a wound can be worked in the other direction. The series’ migration motifs reappear here as practices of return, home-building, and repair, with earlier dark scenes revisited from a higher vantage. Figures who once seemed only monstrous or broken are reintroduced as teachers, thresholds, and guides. The tone is not consoling. It is transmutational. Healing is presented as a discipline that demands full descent before full ascent.
The Redacted Psalms
Spirit, Fermentation
Structured as both a forbidden case archive and prayer book, The Redacted Psalms presents 144 psalm entries with glyphs, margin notes, and intentional errata, supported by a backmatter key. Here, the reader encounters Redactory, a form that treats memory, diagnosis, and even the written record as editable code. Biographical details such as clinics in Brazil, transit through Central America, and life in the United States are fragmented, redacted, and reassembled until they read like a shifting dossier rather than a fixed life story. Characters from earlier books are cross-referenced, renamed, or partially erased, while new marginal hands comment on their fates. Glyphs mark void, breach, mirroring, recursion, time dilation, and other states of consciousness. By the end of this book, the reader has been trained to see that every story about the self, including stories of origin and displacement, can be crossed out, revised, or repurposed.
The Apotheosis Codex
Gold, Coagulation
The final volume is a mythic manual composed of Apotheosis Codex Protocols, structured in ascending strata. Each protocol links to paintings created over twenty-five years, spanning realism, surrealism, and abstraction. This is Archectory, a form that blends ritual instruction, visionary text, and image to teach the reader to operate reality as a layered system. The Codex does not merely describe ascension. It rehearses it. The geography that began in specific streets and waiting rooms in Brazil and continued through border crossings and American rooms is recast as an archetypal migration from third-layer density into higher-dimensional authorship. Faces and bodies the reader has met in all prior volumes return here as composite figures, gods in training, or pure fields of attention. The last revelation speaks directly back to the opening pages of the cycle, closing the loop and revealing the full design.
Across the six books, the same core move repeats in different guises:
A wound appears as a symptom.
The symptom is reframed as a signal.
The signal is turned into an instrument.
The instrument becomes curriculum.
Curriculum becomes protocol.
Protocol becomes authorship.
In character terms, this means that people the reader first meets as victims, patients, or antagonists gradually disclose new layers. The father who appears in a farm story in one book, the patient in a transcript, the man in a Polaroid, and the figure in a painting may slowly resolve as the same presence, seen at different dimensional depths. The series rewards long-term attention. Small details in early books are revealed as seeds for later revelations, and seemingly isolated episodes are recognized as belonging to a continuous network of relationships.
Physically, each volume is conceived as an art object. The series uses distinct visual identities, specific paper aesthetics, and a careful typographic system, integrating paintings and drawings as structural components rather than decoration. The design always echoes the alchemical phases: newsprint textures and marginalia for dissolution; smoke-gray litmus paper for calcination; black vellum grimoire aesthetics for putrefaction; white vellum and gold mirror tones for transmutation; fragmented case files and glyphs for fermentation; and a luminous codex style for coagulation.
Narratively, everything is anchored by Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel, whose presence shifts from Brazilian psychiatrist at a small office in Porto Alegre to migrant to North American clinician to subject to mythographer to absent architect. The reader pieces him and his journey together through transcripts, poems, tales, psalms, paintings, glyphs, and protocols, only to discover that the real subject under study has always been themselves. The books repeatedly collapse observer and observed. Late entries in The Redacted Psalms and The Apotheosis Codex address the reader directly as file, field, and finally co-creator, inviting them to claim the same authorship that Dr. S pursues.
The Hexagonal Box sits at the intersection of literary fiction, hybrid art books, and speculative occult literature. It will appeal to readers of Mark Z. Danielewski, Anne Carson, Ligotti, Borges, and visual textual experiments from independent art presses. It is built to foster a cult readership rather than a casual one, with strong collectible appeal, including multiple hardcovers and dust jackets, glyph keys, reading protocols, and the possibility of limited editions with physical relics or companion objects. Its episodic yet interconnected structure and strong visual identity also make the series suitable for future adaptation into anthology or limited series formats.
Most importantly, this is not a series that simply tells a story about trauma, exile, and transcendence. It is constructed as a long-form initiation. If read in order, it quietly retrains how the reader understands identity, memory, geography, attention, and agency. What begins as a stack of strange books about a missing Brazilian psychiatrist who vanished somewhere between Central America and the United States reveals itself as a hexagonal engine of liberation, psychological and dimensional, that teaches the reader, step by step, how to move from being the subject of an archive to the architect of one.
AUTOMATIC WRITINGS FOR AUTOMATIC DRAWINGS
Clinical sketches & session fragments, 2001–2004
What happens when a psychiatrist draws while you speak, and the picture knows what you did not say?
At the São Lucas Clinic in Porto Alegre, Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel kept case notes in one hand and a grease pencil in the other. Charcoal laid the structure; a single ink afterthought held the sting. When he turned the page toward them, patients went still, then named what they had kept off the record.
Over time the pages began to rhyme: unrelated cases echoing the same forms. Pattern outlasted story.
These recovered files mark the moment a clinician realizes his map will not cover the territory. What starts as evidence becomes a threshold, pointing past orthodox practice toward the dimensional work that consumed his final years.
DARK POEMS IN 100 WORDS
Mythological experiments & archetypal research, 2004–2007
What if you could test a myth like a lab assay, one hundred words at a time?
After leaving clinical practice, Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel crossed the Americas with a notebook and a question: could the oldest stories explain the impossible patterns he saw in therapy? Each poem here is a controlled experiment, exactly one hundred words, run against an archetype. Grail and labyrinth, flood and underworld, trickster and king; geometric forms and haunted symbols; the human mask and whatever looks through it.
The result is not ornament. It is field work in verse. These pieces measure inheritance and transgression, ask whether evil is learned or carried, and press on the limits of fate. Page by page, the myths hold or they break, pointing him toward the dimensional work that would define his final years.
DARK TALES IN 100 WORDS - THE SEVENTH VERTEX
The Consciousness-Altering Grimoire, 2007–2022
What if a book did not ask to be read; what if it operated on you?
In his last decade, Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel built a device disguised as literature: one hundred tales, each exactly one hundred words, paired with charcoal rites drawn in sacred media. Read aloud, the pages behave like switches. The geometry is deliberate; six points are fixed. The last appears only in use.
Early handlers reported odd side effects: objects aligning into hexagonal arrays; a steady sense of being watched from six feet behind and above; a voice not their own clearing its throat in the margins.
The fault line of study and spell. A book that does not describe altered consciousness; it enacts it.
TALES OF THE LIGHT
Healing Counterparts & Dimensional Integration (post-2022)
What if the map of the wound that led you into the ruins could teach the stitch and lead you home?
This is the mirror to Dark Tales. The archetypes return as instruments, not wounds. Where the first book named the break, Tales of the Light names the passage: counter-rites, reversals, and integrations spoken aloud until fracture becomes seam, heat becomes vow, and memory holds without harm.
These pages do not console; they transmute. They show how inherited damage can be worked through with dimensional attention, breath by breath. Whether Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel stands here in flesh or in the field he opened, the work completes the cycle. Shadow mapped. Light practiced.
What dark named, light now mends. You finish what the dark began.
THE REDACTED PSALMS
Suppressed Cases & Erased Accounts (Unknown Dates)
Among the files recovered after Dr. Schlermanlagel’s disappearance was a sealed folder labeled: Unfit for Record.
Inside were excerpts of his previous work too disturbing, too incomplete, or too inexplicable to include in his official writings. Pages struck through in Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel’s own hand. Others blacked by someone else. Names turned to bars.
Some leaves seem self-censored, crossed out, or left half-finished, as if interrupted mid-thought. Whole pages left blank except for a single glyph or a scrawled warning in the margin. Starts without endings; endings without cause.
The Redacted Psalms is the hidden chapter of the Alcemor archive: a book that speaks in omissions, a book that sings the silence between traumas, the parts an honest witness could not say aloud. Shelve it with poetry; handle it like evidence. What remains is the record of what could not be recorded.
THE APOTHEOSIS CODEX
The Creator’s Manual & Final Protocols (2025 – ∞)
What if a book did not write about reality; what if it wrote inside it?
After decades as doctor, mythographer, and archivist, Dr. Alcemor Schlermanlagel steps into his last role: architect. The Codex gathers visionary protocols, impossible geometries, and twenty-five years of paintings into a working manual for the final stage of dimensional practice: direct creation.
The earlier books traced the break. This one shows the making. How trauma is transmuted, how memory becomes manifestation, how a reader crosses from witness to maker. The language is engineered to act: spoken rites, glyph-logic, image as switch.
Scholars who have handled advance leaves describe a text that reorganizes attention as it is read. Call it a grimoire, a manual, an engine.
Here the making begins. Proceed.
Discover Marcelo Halmenschlager Visionary Art
Step into a world of surrealism and imagination with the visionary art of Marcelo Halmenschlager, exploring consciousness, spirituality, and the infinite possibilities of the mind.