We’ve Been Lookin’ for Art in All the Wrong Places
To visit Safemart (usually styled in all caps), you must first make an appointment with Jonathan Runcio. Then, at the appointed time, Runcio will poke his head out of a doorway on a corner in the Dogpatch, where trucks drive by at alarming speeds.
You will enter a warehouse that was once home to Hermann Associates, Inc. — a manufacturer of heavy steel safes and bank vaults. Inside, an old vault door still proudly bears the hand-painted company name.
This is the “low-key, high-security artist-run project space” Safemart, which opened its first show in January 2025. Visiting requires real commitment on a viewer’s part. Over the past year and a half, Safemart has shown mostly local artists, or artists with local ties. It has shown sculptures and rubbings, drawings and ceramics. Safemart shows are intimate by necessity, experimental by invitation.
The latest exhibition, Mike Monteiro’s Play the Hits, is no different. Across the old vault’s short walls, Monteiro has hung seven paintings made with layers upon layers of pigmented wax. Colored drips pour down the sides of his panels, but the surfaces are carved smooth with razor blades. The effect is gauzy, dreamy, even as the images he depicts and the language he deploys evoke violence — state sanctioned and otherwise.
The piece which lends the show its name is six connected panels that form three guillotine blade shapes. A repeated image of a cartoon guillotine (“Gilly,” its blade a smiling face) holds a smiling, empty basket, ready to receive a head. According to Runcio, Monteiro commissioned the illustration from a Disney animator, which feels almost too perfect to be true.
The show’s two largest pieces are patterned after blue-and-white Portuguese tile: LOL Magellan depicts the explorer’s death in the Philippines; All Portuguese Ships Are Slave Ships is bordered by shackles.
Play the Hits contains not one but three paintings of burning Waymos graffitied with “Fuck ICE.” It’s pop art with an earnest, emphatic intent; Monteiro repeats symbols until they’re burned into a viewer’s retina. There’s a neat contrast between some of the imagery (jokey words, cartoons, emojis) and the serious effort Monteiro puts into making the work. Yes, we’re having fun, the images say, but listen closely.
On his Instagram, he details a labor-intensive process that involves carving into wax surfaces, brushing on molten layers of color, then shaving the pieces down, over and over again. Up close, the paintings smell sweetly of beeswax.
Monteiro is a graphic designer by trade, as well as an author. His latest book, How to Die (and Other Stories), is a collection of essays from his newsletter, in which he answers queries like “How to use NO as a complete sentence,” “How to get out of bed,” and “How to feel wonderful.”
It’s clear Monteiro truly wants to help people make things better, despite the ways in which this world is set up to oppose that impulse. If someone is interested in buying one of Monteiro’s pieces, he offers it on an income-based sliding scale.
There are many ways to be an artist, and many ways to make opportunities for people to show their art to others. In Safemart, with Monteiro’s Play the Hits, we find a rather perfect merger of a sometimes-space with someone who isn’t interested in playing into the conventions of exhibition making.
“We give our hearts to people and places that do not deserve them,” reads his exhibition announcement, which at no point talks about the paintings on view. “We should stop, because there are people and places that do deserve them. And we should fill each other’s homes with drawings and love letters.”
Hear, hear.
‘Play the Hits’ is on view by appointment through Aug. 9, 2026 at Safemart (contact for address). Mike Monteiro will read from ‘How to Die (and Other Stories)’ at the exhibition on July 25 and 26, 2–4 p.m.