Absence Fantasia

Stump Gallery is pleased to present Absence Fantasia, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Mariel Montes. The large paintings are constructed using small ephemera: a votive candle of a guardian angel, a scratch-off lotto ticket, in some sense, both objects of faith, both flat illustrations with a promise toward something grander than current material circumstances.

The surfaces are built up with different mediums: airbrush, wax, sand, oil, the folds of the paper label thickened with marble dust. The initial structure of the image gives way to the painting: areas drip, are sanded and scratched into.

The wax sculptures are of Christmas village people, balanced on pinecones or abandoned tire rims, attempts at circular unity. Candles are used both as memorial and as celebration. Birthday candles rest atop the figures like a cake, and yet, in Sinking House, the foreboding weight of metal buries our toy house. They dance on our daily scrap: cardboard, abandoned tires. There is something about redirecting faith toward our small daily acts: Dishwater baptism. Genuflect over the fallen bird.

The small paintings contain psychological landscapes: empty bedrooms seen indirectly through reflection. Fire in My Bedroom doesn’t depict the titular emergency; the fire is felt elsewhere. Toys often serve as a subject matter for my paintings. They are a microcosm of the world, with built in narratives of a pre-established order. They are also frozen representations of figures, flesh turned plastic, porcelain. The being-in-stagnation, the contemporary alienated self. Paper dolls are such, as flat headless non-beings in Window Gawker and Commuter Doll. Windowed and mirrored interiors of Brooklyn collapse beneath her, where she hovers above but is not situated. She is the absence of these spaces. Bunny Disco is much the same: the disco ball collapses as the porcelain bunny tries to gather his own fragmented reflection, and in doing so, confronting the gaze of the viewer. This lifeless gaze matches, maybe, the viewer’s own lifeless stagnation, the crystallized self. Perhaps, these little imitations of life end up containing more life energies than we do, in our alienated state. One imagines that when we turn off the light and leave the room, they start dancing. Everything fantasia.

Mariel Montes (b. 1994, Brooklyn, NY) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA in studio art from Hunter College in 2025. Montes’ work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Blade Study, New York, NY; and Hyacinth Gallery, New York, NY. Montes has participated in selected group exhibitions at Frisson Gallery, New York, NY; Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York, NY; Crisis Galería, Lima, PE; Plum Gallery, New York, NY; The Alcove, Brooklyn, NY; 191 Henry Street, New York, NY; XYZ Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; 205 Hudson Gallery, New York, NY; Serving the People, New York, NY; Tiber59, Mexico City, MX; amongst others. Montes will participate in the Chanorth Residency, Pine Plane, NY, in May, 2026.