Guy Hepner Gallery

Fontaine Scarelli The Waiting Place For Sale

Fontaine Scarelli
Fontaine Scarelli - The Waiting Place, 2026, Mixed media on canvas

The Waiting Place, 2026

Mixed media on canvas

231.1 × 168.9 cm

About this work

The Waiting Place takes its conceptual cue from the experience of threshold — the suspended state between departure and arrival, decision and consequence. At 231 × 169 cm, it is among the largest works in the body of paintings and is built in mixed media with a surface that seems to actively resist conclusion: each passage leads to another, the composition declining to resolve into a single focal point or resting place. Scarelli has spoken of his interest in psychological states that exist between rather than within conventional emotional categories, and The Waiting Place embodies this interest with particular clarity. The painting is about duration — the felt sense of time when nothing is certain. Completed in 2026, it is one of the most emotionally open works in this group.

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Edition & Provenance

Year
2026
Medium
Mixed media on canvas

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About the Paintings Series

Fontaine Scarelli is a Chicago-born and raised abstract painter whose route into art came by way of a fashion design education — an unconventional entry point that continues to inform his sense of composition, texture, and surface. This body of work, presented through Guy Hepner Gallery, brings together large-scale paintings that rank among 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 results range from confrontational near-monochrome compositions to densely chromatic fields, moving between tension and release, entropy and resolution — a process the artist has described as allowing each canvas to reveal itself gradually rather than arriving at a predetermined image.

Scarelli's work draws on an eclectic set of influences — post-apocalyptic cinema, the anthology television series The Twilight Zone, and a solitary upbringing — all filtered into paintings that speak to existential questions of time, memory, and perception. Several works extend his ongoing engagement with science fiction as a lens for examining consciousness, treating imagined alien civilizations not as fantasy but as allegory for psychological states of otherness and the limits of understanding.

Scarelli's paintings have been shown through galleries including Loisir Art Gallery and Chicago's 1871, and made their Miami Art Basel debut through Luminaire; his work has also appeared in spaces such as Saks Fifth Avenue and been the subject of a feature on Amy Kartheiser's "Meet the Maker" series. Collectively, the paintings in this collection show an artist working at the height of his powers: physically demanding in scale, intellectually precise in intent, and emotionally immediate in impact.

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The Waiting Place

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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