Nicolo Gentile Reimagines Queer Identity and History Through Sculpture and Installation
Photo: Nicolo Gentile in his studio, surrounded by the transformative sculptures that redefine narratives of queer identity and history. Photo by Shay Overstone.
Exploring Absence, Presence, and Dualities in Art
Nicolo Gentile’s art challenges identity and memory by intertwining personal and collective narratives, using evocative materials to explore themes of absence, presence, and transformation.
Nicolo Gentile is a vision, a force, and a storyteller whose sculptural and installation works defy simplicity and demand a deep reckoning with the complexities of identity, memory, and collective history. As a master of his craft, Nicolo’s works invite viewers to step into a space where objects become emotions, materials hold narratives, and traces of absence speak louder than presence. Every piece he creates exists within a delicate choreography of dualities: loss and preservation, vulnerability and strength, the body and its surroundings.
What makes Gentile’s practice so deeply resonant is his fearless exploration of queer identity and history, specifically through the lens of the AIDS epidemic and its enduring legacy. By navigating the spaces between nostalgia and futurity, his art becomes a vessel for honoring the memory of those we have lost while simultaneously charting new paths of queer expression and resistance. His mastery of materials—iron, steel, leather, and latex—transcends their physicality, transforming them into symbols of power, desire, and transgression. Each of his sculptures pulses with life and presence, asking the viewer to reflect, connect, and commune with what has been and what is yet to come.
Nicolo Gentile’s work is as much about the personal as it is the collective. With rigorous research, critical awareness, and a profound connection to the archival past, he reframes dominant narratives surrounding whiteness, masculinity, and power. The result is art that is both unsettling and magnetic, deeply rooted in intimacy yet far-reaching in its political urgency.
It is an honor for WOWwART to highlight the work of an artist whose practice not only captivates but also challenges us to confront the weight of history and the possibilities of the future. In the interview that follows, Gentile unpacks his influences, themes, and processes with the same openness and care that define his art. Prepare to be moved, provoked, and inspired by a creator whose work reshapes the way we see and experience the world.
Nicolo Gentile’s work masterfully intertwines personal narratives with cultural history, creating powerful and evocative sculptures that resonate deeply with viewers.
Your work explores themes of presence, absence, and ecstasy within the context of relational identity and sexuality. Can you talk about how these themes manifest in your sculptures and installations?
I am inspired by the way absence can evoke a sense of loss, a passage of time, or create a site of entry or projection into the work by the viewer. This absence is initially formal: images cut, redacted, and fragmented; a body’s impression left in cast metal or wax or in the swaying of disturbed beads; the accumulation of material, found objects or mark without its maker or source. But within the historical and contemporary context of the AIDS epidemic, this absence formalized in the work points to a cultural, societal and political absence outside of itself. Lost members of a community, voices of a generation have created a gap in cultural influence. Their absence is felt and experienced daily, their legacy mapped on my body, shaping how I interact with and within the world around me.
“I am inspired by the way absence can evoke a sense of loss, a passage of time, or create a site of entry or projection into the work by the viewer.” – Nicolo Gentile
How does the historical context of the 1990s AIDS epidemic influence your artistic practice, and how do you see it resonating with contemporary queer experiences?
Not one to accept the way things are, I instead find myself in the futile pursuit of the origin point of our cultural conditioning to better understand the societal pressures and aesthetic influences that have shaped me. Within the historical and contemporary context of the AIDS crisis, we find ourselves in the wake of a tragedy that has greatly informed our understanding, construction and expression of ourselves and of our desires, of our ways of relating and of our sites of communing. By pulling from and referencing experiences of the past, I hope a contemporary viewer may occupy the liminal and inspiring space between the way things are and the way things once were.
“By pulling from and referencing experiences of the past, I hope a contemporary viewer may occupy the liminal and inspiring space between the way things are and the way things once were.” – Nicolo Gentile
Leather, latex, iron, and steel are central to your work. How do these materials function within the sculptures, and what do they symbolize in relation to queer transgression and identity?
I love the way materials mediate our experiences of a place, of an action, of one another. Culling the ubiquity of iron, leather and steel, I hope to stir and reveal the queerness latent in these materials with my work. From the comparison of iron and steel to the bodies of athletes and bodybuilders (and in turn, these materials function in gender construction and masculinities), to the use of leather and latex within subcultural kink communities and the pursuit of pleasure, these materials represent a second skin that sits between us and our environment. My sculptures in turn become bodies, sharing and taking up space with the viewer.
There seems to be a tension between nostalgic longing and queer futurity in your work. How do you navigate these competing forces in your creative process, and what role does this duality play in your art?
This duality is an exhilarating tension present in my studio practice. I navigate these forces with the help of others, namely queer theorists and artists of reference. Jose Estaban Munoz’s theories of queer futurity and intersectionality offers a political potential of remembering the past. His body of work and my critical research aims to perform within the “modality of ecstatic time”; to radicalize queerness through the reanimation of spaces and experiences of the past for the critical reimagining of the future. However, in recognizing the distance that I have from the time period of reference, I have begun looking more deeply into theories of nostalgia and the transformative power of archival work.
Rhetorician Jaqueline Rhoads characterizes queer archival engagement as the “self receiving an echo of itself from the past—an interaction with history from which one returns to oneself changed, refracted somewhat, and through which the past is also reflected, returned to itself afresh.” However, recognizing the privileged and dominating position of the white gay male within the Queer archive, I am developing new skills in engaging with and against this dominance.
There is an increasingly interconnected network of influence at play in my work. As someone whose work focuses greatly on desire, appetite and attraction, I find it exhilarating to lay bare the ways many of these libidinal motivations are socialized, internalized, performed and recapitulated. I find the aforementioned tension important to work through and materialize in the work; to connect something singular, personal and interior to its broader historical and cultural context.
Power dynamics, particularly concerning whiteness, gender, and masculinities, are key themes in your practice. Can you elaborate on how these themes manifest in your installations and sculptures, and how they are addressed through the materials you use?
Art has the profound ability to altern one’s perception of time. There’s something about sharing space with a work, an object, a performance and to experience this work in terms of its own time, the time the work demands. It can be unsettling at first as it literally upends and ungrounds the viewer’s initial experience of time and replaces it with a pace of its own. But I do think, once you open yourself to that experience and subject yourself to the experience and intention of another, a new understanding of yourself is made accessible. It is this liminal space and exchange of power that I aim to evoke with my work and installations.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Nicolo Gentile’s Put to Wrest (Mental Muscle) is an evocative exploration of materiality and identity, merging expansive metal sheets with fragmented imagery in a strikingly visceral composition. The intricate details, combined with the industrial weight of the materials, reflect a dynamic tension between strength and vulnerability. This piece masterfully embodies themes of presence and absence, inviting viewers to grapple with concepts of relational identity and the body as both a site and a story. Gentile’s ability to infuse emotional depth into his sculptures makes this work a powerful meditation on the intersections of personal and cultural history.
