Ernesto Renda: the intersection of queer film and fine art

Ernesto Renda has been with Art in Res for over a year and a half, and is our first feature for the Art in Res PRIDE series. On Art in Res, you can find a wide range of Renda's work, and his three most recent additions, Bisexual, Where's Your Wife?, and Camping Stove with Beans each come from important queer films or queer moments in film––A Shot at love with Tila Tequila, American Beauty, and Brokeback Mountain, respectively.

"Through my painting and drawing practice, I try to explore what bearing film and moving-image media have on visual culture and contemporary modes of witnessing," Ernesto said about his work. "Since 2017, I have focused on the frottage (rubbing) technique as a material encounter between two flat images. My works begin with an underlying resin relief, an extruded line drawing. After laying canvas over it, this relief is hidden or erased, but then 're-surfaces' through friction in the wax and oil pastel drawing over the canvas. The two drawings are either based on appropriated stills, which appear in sequence in the source material, or they are drawn from my own imagination—acting as storyboards for a film that has not yet been produced. By locking the two layers in the same pictorial space, I can begin to grasp the anti-matter of film editing. The cinematic theory of montage holds that the meaning of film is synthesized in the space between two shots. Rather than reproducing the seductive singularity of a film still, my works attempt to hone in on that elusive synthesis, allowing the viewer to take baby steps forward and backward in screen-time."

Has being a part of the LGBTQ+ community influenced your work as an artist? In what ways?

There have been many ways that my identity as gay/queer person has influenced my work. I think that I look for ways to talk about my identity that go beyond representation or illustration of gay life. The center of my practice is the frottage process, which I see as the queer alternative to the straightness of painting. It also carries multiple meanings: it can refer to both an art technique and also a sexual act of non-penetrative rubbing. Frottage is as much about the mark you are making as it is about the surface that is already there. In my last year of BFA at RISD, I did a series of works that looked like classroom chalkboards which were imagining "alternative" topics that could be discussed in sex education curricula, frottage being one example. In my work dealing with film, I am exploring the way that the cutaway is the moment that materializes the continued erasure/intolerability of sexuality (particularly queer sexuality). Many films I reference have some kind of gay content: Eating Out, Call Me By Your Name, Alien: Covenant, High School Musical 2 just to name a few. In my "Kisses" series, I looked at all the gay kisses that actor and art influencer Russel Tovey has done on screen. I think it's still very new to see a successful gay actor playing gay roles, and the act of collecting those kisses references queer fandom communities online that do all sorts of unrecognized curatorial work in collecting precious pieces of on-screen gayness and queerness.

What is a piece of advice you would give to young/teen LGBTQ+ artists as they make their way into the industry or the world in general?

You aren't the first generation of queer artists and neither am I. There is a long history of LGBTQ+ artists in the avant-garde of creative fields as well as social justice, and you should feel comfortable looking to your fore-bears for strategies and inspiration. Don't feel like you have to make work that has easily legible and recognizable "LGBTQ+" themes and content. Your identity does not have to translate into the work in an easy way for the viewer, and if/when it does, it won't necessarily be on purpose. You will encounter people who want to use your voice and your work for your identity "token" while lacking an actual interest in your project or a commitment to the ongoing struggle for equality and liberation--learn how to differentiate the real from the fake.