What if mountains spoke without first being spoken to? What if they cradled the earth beneath them as though that had always been their purpose? Such cosmological questions animate Sometime Somewhere Someone Is Dancing, Lola Stong-Brett’s New York solo debut at James Fuentes Gallery. The exhibition embraces a world where the ordinary slips easily into the mythical, where landscapes, bodies, and memory collapse into one another. It is at once chaotic and deeply ordered, a rendering of everyday life transformed into something more elemental, overtaking the gallery with startling conviction. The exhibition reflects one of contemporary painting’s enduring ambitions: not simply to represent the world, but to construct entirely new conditions for seeing it.
Stong-Brett’s practice emerges from the abstraction of the sea, drawing on her years living along the coast in Margate, England. Cartoon-like figures—reminiscent of Popeye, Bimbo, and an evolving cast of her own unnamed characters—surface from fields of heightened gestural abstraction, appearing and disappearing within turbulent passages of paint. Their world is shaped as much by memory as imagination. Council estates, stairwells, brickwork, beds, and pool tables—all forms associated with the artist’s lived environment—recur throughout the exhibition, lending the paintings a distinctly domestic familiarity while retaining the weight and solidity of brutalist architecture. For Stong-Brett, these forms are not simply motifs but part of the visual language of home. The installation of the show builds upon these foundations, operating far less like a conventional white-cube gallery than as a cacophony of saturated color—fiery reds, electric blues, deep reddish-browns, and sunlit yellows.
In Yellow Raft and Christ (2026), figures intertwine, clinging to one another in what could be a struggle or an embrace. It is a shifting choreography of human connection—the experience of holding on and letting go, of desire existing alongside loss, and of intimacy persisting through separation. The painting is dense, refusing immediate legibility. Only through sustained looking do its passages of color begin to cohere, allowing bodies to emerge from abstraction. To experience the work fully requires an uncommon openness, a willingness to remain with its deep chromatic atmosphere until seeing gives way to feeling. The painting ultimately functions less as an image than as a place of encounter, one in which perception itself becomes the subject.
A sense of monumentality reverberates throughout the exhibition. When You Sat Beside Me (2026) is the clearest example of this idea, a well-formed synthesis of everything that makes Stong-Brett’s work hers. Popeye stands in neon-blue duplicity, two mirrored figures confronting one another chin to chin. Their arms stretch outward in a suspended rumble, not touching one another but holding between them a ship—a fragile vessel caught within the tension of their exchange. The painting gathers together the artist’s recurring concerns: childhood imagery, the instability of memory, the drama of the sea, and the transformation of familiar forms into something larger and more mythic. There is no formula by which to understand Stong-Brett’s work; its force lies in its refusal to settle into a single interpretation, instead asking viewers to move between recognition and uncertainty, where sensation becomes its own form of understanding.
Stong-Brett’s paintings expand far beyond the walls of the show, evoking a spiritual register that resists language itself. Although these are new works, they feel as though they exist prior to critical interpretation; they ask less to be analyzed than to be experienced. To encounter them requires a sensory intelligence, a mode of perception in which seeing itself becomes a form of thinking. Stong-Brett invites us to reconsider the images we have inherited—the cartoon figures we grew up with and the landscapes we dwarf beneath—as living presences with meanings that exceed those we have assigned to them.
Lola Stong Brett: Sometime Somewhere Someone Is Dancing is on view at James Fuentes, New York, from June 26 to August 7, 2026.
