Artist Spotlight: Joseph Renda Jr.
Joseph Renda Jr. is a Vertical Gallery institution. The Chicago-based pop surrealist painter (IG: j.renda_artist) first exhibited in our space in 2017 as part of our all-star holiday pop-up event, and in mid-2020 we presented ‘Biophilia,’ his first-ever solo gallery show. A second solo showcase, ‘Larger Than Life,’ followed two years later. You can find Joe’s work for sale on our website, including pieces never exhibited in the gallery.
In the debut installment of Vertical’s Artist Spotlight series, Joe previews his newest work, tips his hat to René Magritte and explains why surrealism is here to stay.
Vertical Gallery: You’re exhibiting next month in Brussels opposite French street artist Onemizer in an Affordable Art Fair duo show presented by Galerie One. Tell us about the work you’re presenting.
Joseph Renda Jr.: Around the end of 2023, I began revamping what I’m doing with my art, and what I want to be doing. At that time, I was packing in as much visual imagery as I could, and everything was so busy. I wanted to take a step back, and do something more refined.
I developed a series about freedom, free will and choice — the things in our lives that we can control, and those we can’t control. All of the pieces included a cloud, which is a motif for freedom. A cloud can take any form, and it can go anywhere. It’s also a contradiction, because it’s really heavy, but it floats in the air. Some of the pieces were about manmade objects built to contain the cloud, and others were about objects built in order to reach the cloud.
The paintings I’m exhibiting in Brussels are similar in concept. They bring back the landscapes and larger-than-life objects in my previous work, but I’m still focused on keeping things simple, although painting them wasn’t simple, because I was painting things that were complicated. There are three paintings with bricks — hundreds of bricks between them — and I painted each brick individually, which took a lot of hours.
Belgium is the birthplace of René Magritte, a profound influence on your work. What does it mean to you to exhibit there?
It’s awesome. What I like about Magritte is that everything in his paintings exists within reality, and when I first visited Brussels a year ago, I saw how much the environment influenced his work. So many of the interiors in his paintings came from inside his own house, like the fireplace in “Time Transfixed” [a.k.a. 1938’s “La durée poignardée,” part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection]. I’m hoping the Brussels audience will respond to Magritte’s influence on my work.
One hundred years ago this November, Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris presented ‘La peinture surréaliste,’ the first-ever group survey of Surrealist painters, among them Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Paul Klee. Why does surrealism remain so relevant and so resonant a century on?
The point of all art is to make people think. Landscapes and portraits do it in a certain way, pop art does it in another way, but surrealism does it so effectively because it’s visually odd. You can’t look at a surrealist painting without questioning something about it. No other medium does that.
When I look at work by the artists I love, whether it’s Magritte or Salvador Dali, HERA or Collin van der Sluijs, it feels like it comes from their subconscious. I’ve always wanted to do that, but it’s not how I create. I’m very much a planned painter, which is why I like Magritte’s juxtapositions — the real things in odd situations.
Will surrealism endure for another century?
Surrealism came out of World War I. Life was as crazy then as it is now, and the Surrealists created work that expressed their confusion. As long as the world stays crazy, there will continue to be surrealist artists.
Besides Brussels, where can we see your work in the months to come?
I’m part of a three-person Vertical Gallery show in September alongside Laura Catherwood and Jerome Tiunayan. I’m creating a series of paintings on windows, exploring what windows mean to people and treating them as portals to different places. Windows are a motif that recurs throughout my work, but this is the first time I’ve made them the focus.
