Nicolo

Gentile

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Nicolo Gentile

Nicolo Gentile approaches collage with a striking originality, balancing the fragility of paper against the weight of metal. Drawn to materials linked with containment, submission, performance, and control, he frames his practice through a queer lens, noting that collage resists the neatness assimilation demands. His work resonates on many levels, yet it is through his writing that the full breadth of his vision begins to unfold.
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In the Words of the Artist

My work is rooted in sculpture and installation and explores the shifting intersections of queerness, memory, and material culture. I’m particularly interested in how bodies—and the spaces they occupy—hold both historical and personal residue. Drawing from the materials of fitness, kink, and industry, I use steel, leather, aluminum, and archival imagery to investigate power, loss, and survival. Much of my work engages with the legacy of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the aesthetics that emerged in its wake, reframing these histories within the context of contemporary queer identity.

My practice operates in the messy space between presence and absence, strength and subjugation, discipline, grief, and desire. I’m interested in what gets held, what slips through, and how queer identity is constructed, crushed, and reassembled through material. Think: post-bathhouse industrial minimalism with a latex twist. I try to make objects that remember for us when the archive doesn't.

Collage refuses the neatness that assimilation demands. It embraces contradiction, multiplicity, and rupture—all things that queerness thrives in. In my work, collage becomes a way to hold desire and doubt at the same time, to create space for eroticism that doesn’t flatten into marketable identity. When everything queer gets filtered through rainbow logos and dating apps that ask you to pick a torso type, collage lets you say: no, I’m many things—some of them broken, some of them beautiful, some of them just barely holding together. And that’s hot. There’s eroticism in the layers, the cuts, the tension. That friction—that unstable beauty—is where resistance and ecstasy live. And that ecstasy doesn’t have to be polished—it can be raw, ambivalent, and still leave a mark.

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I was a kid in the '90s, absorbing fear, shame, and strength in equal parts. Queerness was something whispered or catastrophized, depending on the channel. Coming of age in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis shaped my understanding of community, intimacy, and embodiment. My work is grounded in that inheritance—of grief, resilience, and resistance—but also in the gaps it left behind. I’m interested in the architectures and aesthetics that held queerness during that time: gyms, bars, magazines, leather, metal, screens. By reactivating these materials and sites, I’m not just remembering; I’m not here to live in nostalgia.

I want queer futures that are messier, freer, sexier—where vulnerability isn’t punished and pleasure isn’t policed. I’m imagining alternative futures where queer pleasure and vulnerability are not just allowed but celebrated. I hope queer futures are fluid, communal, and unapologetically complex—where identity isn’t commodified but embodied and continually reimagined.

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Collage is both a method and a metaphor. It’s how I understand my body, my history, and probably my personality. It’s a way of working that embraces fragmentation, layering, and contradiction—reflecting how queer lives are often assembled from incomplete histories, coded languages, and ephemeral connections; a manifestation of queer time: non-linear, always in fragments, stitched with care and contradiction. Collage allows me to bring together disparate materials, bodies, and memories in ways that honor their instability and multiplicity. It’s also a survival strategy through assembly: a means of making meaning from what remains, of insisting on presence even through fracture.

Queer life often involves assembling oneself from partial stories, coded gestures, and spectral histories. Collage is how queer people live—we take what we’re given, what’s discarded, what’s charged, and we make meaning out of it. It’s inherently about rupture and reconstitution, about making something whole from what was broken or buried. In my work, collage becomes a way to hold grief and pleasure together, insisting that fragmented experiences still carry meaning. It’s a strategy of survival, of crafting belonging from dislocation, and of insisting on legibility even when the archive refuses you.

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I’m drawn to materials that carry tension—both literal and symbolic. Steel, leather, latex, and mesh are associated with containment, submission, performance, and control, all of which resonate with the codes of BDSM and gym culture. These materials carry a history of gendered and racialized power dynamics, and when reconfigured, they become tools of both critique and desire. The spirit of queer transgression in my practice comes from reclaiming these materials not as symbols of domination, but as vessels for tenderness, memory, and subversion.

The 12th Street Gym was more than a place to work out—it was a site of transformation, intimacy, and survival; where sweat and sex and healing happened under the same fluorescent lights. It wasn’t perfect, but it held something real. For many, it held the energy of the bathhouse and the discipline of the bodybuilder; it was erotic, communal, and deeply queer. Its demolition wasn’t just about losing a building—it was about losing a piece of lived history, a place where bodies gathered, held one another, and bore witness. What should be remembered is not just the architecture, but the touch, the repetition, the resilience that pulsed through that space. It’s about everyday rituals, the mundane sacred. We built community between reps and in the sauna.

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Queer minimalism, for me, is about restraint as a form of resistance—about using absence and subtlety to speak volumes. Collage allows me to introduce messiness, emotion, and history into that space without abandoning the rigor of form. It complicates minimalism’s supposed neutrality by embedding it with queer content, grief, and erotic charge. It heats up the cool by adding sweat, shame, desire, and memory. By layering materials and meanings, collage becomes a way to honor those legacies while queering them—resisting purity, resisting closure.

I often feel like I’m making work with one eye in the rearview mirror and one eye closed. I long for things I was too young to fully know—like cruising culture or ACT UP meetings—but I also want something new, something that isn’t just trauma looping. That tension shows up in the materials. I use materials that carry memory and loss, but I activate them in ways that point forward: steel that remembers, gestures that repeat, forms that rupture. My sculptures often hold this duality physically—something pulls back while something else pushes through. They often feel like they’re holding their breath, waiting for either collapse or breakthrough. That’s where I live creatively— I’m constantly moving between honoring the past and refusing to be stuck in it. I’m in that suspended space between longing and possibility.  

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About the Artist

Nicolo Gentile is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia. His sculptures and installations explore queer identity through material memory, examining the cultural residue of the body, gym, and club as sites of transformation, survival, and desire. Drawing from the materials of kink, industry, and sport, his work investigates shifting power dynamics of gender, whiteness, and masculinity. A child of the '90s, Gentile’s work often looks back in order to look forward—channeling the ghosts of queer spaces past to imagine more capacious futures. Gentile holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he is a recipient of support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Association of Public Art.

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