Introduction

Montoya Studio Practice

Perception is shaped through repetition, variation, and sustained attention. The paintings presented on this website engage abstraction as a means of examining how visual experience develops over time—through atmosphere, surface, and subtle shifts in form and light. Rather than depicting fixed subjects, the work foregrounds conditions of looking, inviting viewers to attend to how environment, orientation, and memory quietly influence perception.

Across multiple series, recurring elements such as layered surfaces, chromatic modulation, and rhythmic patterning operate as perceptual frameworks rather than representations. The paintings appear not as images to be read, but as experiential references — familiar phenomena that register indirectly through visual structure and material process. Accumulation and restraint play central roles, allowing meaning to emerge gradually through sustained engagement.

Together, these works propose abstraction as an investigative space: one in which attention, material response, and temporal development shape how visual experience is formed and re-formed. This website presents selected paintings that reflect an ongoing inquiry into perception, process, and the conditions that quietly structure how we see.

Objects Above Us

Recent Artwork Series

Perception is shaped by environment, memory, and position within space. In Objects Above Us, Montoya explores how elements of the sky — ever present yet easily overlooked — quietly inform visual attention and experience.

Sergio A. Montoya is a research scientist and artist living and working in Southern California.