Guy Hepner Gallery

Fontaine Scarelli Klingon- Fire Before Memory For Sale

Fontaine Scarelli
Fontaine Scarelli - Klingon- Fire Before Memory, 2025, Mixed media on canvas

Klingon- Fire Before Memory, 2025

Mixed media on canvas

213.4 × 152.4 cm

About this work

Part of Scarelli's ongoing science fiction sub-series, Klingon — Fire Before Memory draws on the Klingon civilisation as conceived across Star Trek's fifty-year mythology — a culture defined by honour, martial ferocity, and a complex relationship with memory and inheritance. Rather than illustrating the source material, Scarelli uses it as a psychological framework, the painting interrogating what it means to act before reflection, to exist in a state of pure instinct and will. The mixed-media surface — built on a 213 × 152 cm canvas in 2025 — is among the most physically aggressive in the series, with areas of raw impasto and dragged pigment that seem to have been laid down at speed. The title's qualifier, Fire Before Memory, introduces a temporal paradox: combustion that precedes knowledge of its own cause. The painting holds this contradiction without resolving it.

Price on Application

Edition & Provenance

Year
2025
Medium
Mixed media on canvas

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Klingon- Fire Before Memory

About Fontaine Scarelli

Fontaine Scarelli is a Chicago-born abstract expressionist painter whose large-scale, immersive canvases explore the psychological space between reality and illusion, memory and erasure, time and dissolution. Working from his Chicago studio, he builds layered compositions that carry both emotional vulnerability and formal control, paintings that don't just decorate a room but change how it feels to stand in it.

His path into painting wasn't the usual one. After earning a Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Design at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago, he walked away from that world to find a visual language of his own. That break left him with a defiant independence that still shapes his practice today. His influences range from post-apocalyptic cinema and The Twilight Zone to a solitary upbringing in Chicago, and his work sits in that existential border zone between perception and dissonance, the familiar and the uncanny. He builds his canvases through accumulation, layering, reworking, excavating, with each brushstroke functioning as an act of self-discovery. The result is work that reads as both gestural and calculated, raw and composed, deeply personal yet widely resonant.

Scarelli's rise has been fast. In 2025 he debuted his first international solo exhibition, 11:11 On Another Planet, at Gaia Art Gallery in Hong Kong, with a feature in Milk X Magazine. His Chicago solo show Fractured Continuum (2024) built his local reputation, and his large-scale painting The Idea of Time was acquired by global design firm Perkins&Will for permanent installation in their Chicago studio. His work has shown at Art Basel Miami Beach through Luminaire, appeared at Saks Fifth Avenue, and been featured on WGN-TV's Spotlight Chicago.

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