PS Featured Recent Grad: Nicolo Gentile
PS Featured Artist Nicolo Gentile (b. 1991) is a conceptual artist working and living in Philadelphia, PA. He received his MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Sculpture and his BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Gentile’s work is an investigation of Queer radicalism, presence, absence and ecstasy. From the gym to the showers, from the dance floor to the bedroom, his work examines the physical conditions of relational identity and sexuality construction. Composed of leather, latex, iron and steel, his sculptures and installations slip between recognizable materials of kink, industry and sport to address the oscillating power dynamics of gender, masculinities and BDSM. Inspired by politically motivated 1990s abstraction responding to the AIDS epidemic, his work looks to reclaim the critical capacity of the queer minimalist gesture in a time of gay pragmatism, assimilation and continued alienation.
“The Covid-19 pandemic exposed a need for my practice to reach outward, towards the community for which I make. The social distancing and seclusion that this period has brought about has been personally challenging, but bears a likeness to times of severe isolation in Queer history that still effects the LGBTQIA+ community, namely the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In an effort to create space for intergenerational dialogue and exchange, I began a new publication project titled Queer and Now, a compilation of interviews with Leathermen, ACT UP members, art fags and LGBTQIA+ community members formatted as personal ads. This text, available in my thesis exhibition installation entitled Tough Love, gave me the opportunity to hold space for the shared histories, narratives and personal stories and to bridge a severed vein of intergenerational influence. Building on the work of queer visual artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tony Feher and Roni Horn, Tough Love bridges intergenerational aesthetic concerns to adopt tactics of abstraction that transform queerness from a marker of difference into one of sensuality, embodiment and action. The installation consists of an archival queer club and kink-scene image imposed onto the surface of an architecturally scaled nickel-plated ball chain curtain hung on a modular structure. The curtain, a monumental feature of public cruising sites and sex clubs, is reenvisioned as an experiential threshold to queer imagination transforming the physical site into the psychological and performative space of speculation and imagination. I currently have a shared studio at the Tyler School of Art.”