Guy Hepner Gallery

Fontaine Scarelli Romulan - Shadows Within Shadows For Sale

Fontaine Scarelli
Fontaine Scarelli - Romulan - Shadows Within Shadows, 2025, Mixed media on canvas

Romulan - Shadows Within Shadows, 2025

Mixed media on canvas

208.3 × 177.8 cm

About this work

The third entry in Scarelli's science fiction sub-series, Romulan — Shadows Within Shadows draws on one of Star Trek's most psychologically complex civilisations: a culture defined by concealment, strategic deception, and a deep suspicion of transparency. For Scarelli, the Romulan becomes a figure for the layers of self that remain permanently hidden — not through malice but through the necessity of interior privacy. At 208 × 178 cm and built in mixed media, the painting is among the most tonally dark in the series, its surfaces built from overlapping layers of colour that absorb rather than reflect light. Shadows Within Shadows is not about darkness as absence but as depth: the painting asking how many versions of oneself can coexist in a single interior space. Completed in 2025.

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Edition & Provenance

Year
2025
Medium
Mixed media on canvas

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About the Paintings Series

This body of work, presented through Guy Hepner Gallery, brings together fourteen large-scale paintings spanning 2025 to 2026, some of the most ambitious canvases of Scarelli's career to date. Working at scales that command architectural presence, Scarelli builds each surface through sustained accumulation, applying and stripping back oil, acrylic, charcoal, and mixed media in successive layers until the painting finds its own internal logic.

The works range from confrontational near-monochrome compositions to densely chromatic fields, moving between tension and release, entropy and resolution. Several paintings draw on Scarelli's ongoing engagement with science fiction as a lens for examining consciousness, treating alien civilisations not as fantasy but as allegory for psychological states of otherness, perception, and the limits of understanding.

Collectively, these paintings show a painter working at the height of his powers: physically demanding in scale, intellectually precise in intent, and emotionally immediate in impact.

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Romulan - Shadows Within Shadows

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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