Across distinct geographies and generations, the practices of Brittany Fanning, Mario Dávalos, Fernando Varela, and Cici McMonigle converge in their shared investigation of how perception is constructed: through image, memory, form, and spirit. Whether through Fanning’s fragmented meditations on femininity and visual culture, Dávalos’s poetic layering of time and territory, Varela’s metaphysical systems of line and geometry, or McMonigle’s intimate explorations of fable and fantasy, each artist dissolves the boundary between what is seen and what is sensed.
Together, their works offer a multiplicity of entry points into the ways we shape, inherit, and reimagine the visible world...
Mario Dávalos (b. 1978) is an artist based in Santo Domingo whose work explores the shifting relationship between nature, perception, and the unseen. Working across painting and photography, his practice captures the tension between what is present and what escapes the frame: the interplay of memory and material; wilderness and construction. Davalos’ paintings share a sense of spaciousness. Built through layers of abstraction, they suggest maps, weather systems, or interior terrain — spaces where form dissolves into atmosphere. Across media, his work is marked by restraint, subtlety, and a deep engagement with how we situate ourselves within the visible world.In his photographic work, the Dominican artist travels to remote and ecologically sensitive geographies — Alaska, the Galápagos, the Amazon, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and Antarctica among many others — not to document, but to observe. His images resist narrative; they feel suspended, quiet, often emptied of human presence, like landscapes waiting to be remembered.
Mario holds a Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design in New York which he completed after graduating from the acclaimed School of Design CHAVÓN. His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art of Santo Domingo, Vogelsang Gallery in the Hamptons and Istanbul, District & Co, among many others.
Brittany Fanning (b.1991 Jacksonville, Florida), is a Los Angeles-based, figurative painter with a rapidly growing following amongst collectors and curators in the international art world. Her vibrant, variously dreamlike and playful scenes are informed by some of the luxurious architectural spaces, curated gardens and leisure pursuits native to L.A. and Florida. Inhabited by a solitary and anonymous female figure who might be a stand-in for, simultaneously, the artist and the viewer, the spaces are Fanning’s conjurings of imagined places of comfort and solitude, refuges from a world of seemingly constant crisis. In some pieces, the cameo and dead-pan appearance of wild animals such as wolves, mountain lions, and lizards, symbolize the threats that may lie in wait in the world-at-large. Beautifully and densely painted and wryly humorous and knowing, Fanning’s are personal negotiations with the complex and often intractable demands and questions posed by contemporary life.
Fanning earned a BA at the University of North Georgia, Dahlonega (2014), spent seven years developing her painting practice in Seoul, before moving to Los Angeles in April 2022. She began exhibiting in Korea in 2018 and has had recent solo exhibitions at Mindy Solomon, Miami (2025), Heliconia Projects x Portray Magazine, Miami (2024), Heliconia Projects, Casa de Campo (2024), Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2024); The Lodge, Los Angeles (2023); OTI, Los Angeles (2023) and Galerie BHAK, Seoul (2022). Recent group shows include: Hotel Warszawa Fair with Heliconia Projects (2024), San Francisco Art Fair with Good Mother, San Francisco (2024), Glass Rice, LA (2024), Alabaster Projects, LA (2024).
Fernando Varela (b. 1951, Montevideo) is a Dominican-Uruguayan artist whose abstract practice spanning painting, sculpture, and installation centres on metaphysical themes and the symbolic language of geometry. Over the course of four decades, he has cultivated a visual language grounded in philosophical thought, sacred architecture, and esoteric systems of meaning. Over four decades, Varela has developed a distinctive visual language informed by philosophy, sacred architecture, and esoteric systems. In Form & Void, Close-Ups, and Fragmentations, Varela multiplies ovoid shapes within irregular, softly edged geometries that suggest both containment and expansion. Each hollow form is a symbolic vessel; an abstract echo of the primordial egg—conveying the void not as absence, but as latent potential. A single oval form recurs across the series, embodying the unseen energies that structure both physical and metaphysical realms.
Recent exhibitions include Form and Void, a duo show with Carmen Herrera at Upsilon Gallery in New York (2025); Hotel Warszawa Art Fair with Heliconia Projects (2024); a solo presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo for FIACI Art Fair (2023); and his major retrospective MUNDOS: los tránsitos de Fernando Varela at Centro León in Santiago, Dominican Republic (2021), which offered a comprehensive view of his evolving artistic framework.
Cici McMonigle’s (b. 2001 Tianjin, China) creatures don’t simply emerge—they erupt. Fanged, feathered, or glowing, her beasts inhabit a world at once primal and psychological, ancient and newly imagined. Raised between Chinese and American cultures, McMonigle paints from the fertile crossroads of fable and fantasy, where childhood memory, folklore, and pop culture intermingle in dazzling excess. Her works fuse traditional Chinese motifs with the unruly color fields of Western cartoons and surrealist gestures, creating a charged visual language that is as playful as it is confrontational. Drawing inspiration from Chinese folk toys, mythological archetypes, and her own subconscious, McMonigle’s characters channel a form of cultural hybridism that refuses to be tamed. These monsters—wild, bright, and unnervingly human—become avatars for the complexities of identity, diaspora, and belonging. In McMonigle’s hands, the monstrous is not something to be feared but embraced: a site of transformation, release, and coded storytelling.Her visual world resonates with traditions of automatism and expressive figuration, echoing the legacy of post-war movements like CoBrA while anchoring her vision firmly in the present. As part of a new generation of artists redefining figuration through myth and multiplicity, McMonigle invites us into a landscape where boundaries dissolve and meaning is negotiated through the surreal.
Cici McMonigle is currently based in Miami, where she is a resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. She has exhibited her work at the NSU Art Museum, KDR, and Latitude Gallery. She studied Fine Art at Parsons.
