Guy Hepner Gallery

Fontaine Scarelli Vanity For Sale

Fontaine Scarelli
Fontaine Scarelli - Vanity, 2026, Oil, Acrylic and Charcoal on canvas

Vanity, 2026

Oil, Acrylic and Charcoal on canvas

213.4 × 121.9 cm

About this work

Vanity is a painting about performance and surface — the gap between how things appear and what they are. Working in oil, acrylic, and charcoal on a tall canvas (213 × 122 cm), Scarelli builds a composition that is simultaneously beautiful and precarious, its evident refinement undercut by the charcoal's insistence on register and record. The title's connotation of futility — the vanitas tradition of painting that frames beauty as transient and ultimately meaningless — runs through the work without overwhelming it. Scarelli is not making a moralistic painting but a formally sophisticated one, in which the subject of vanity is examined with an eye simultaneously critical and appreciative. Completed in 2026, Vanity is among the most formally elegant works in this presentation.

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Edition & Provenance

Year
2026
Medium
Oil, Acrylic and Charcoal 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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Vanity

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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