Joseph Renda Jr. masterfully merges architectural motifs — arched portals, windows, frayed façades—with nature to create scenes that feel dream-adjacent yet rooted in tangible reality. His work echoes Magritte through clean lines and surreal juxtapositions, but Renda’s focus is less about the hidden psyche and more about what surrounds us: gardens, certain birds, skies, tools, plants — each element laden with its own symbolic weight. In these compositions, the sky sometimes breaks open, as though to suggest the world we see might itself be a thin veneer over something more mysterious.
Bird imagery in Renda’s canvases often signals ideas of liberty, hope, and spiritual connection; plants tend to represent growth or transformation; storms evoke change and imbalance; tools suggest human presence and agency. Set within portals — stone arches, windows, or architectural frames — these symbols hover between familiarity and otherworldliness. The frames do not separate worlds entirely, but act as thresholds through which the ordinary and esoteric coexist, blurring boundaries between what is real and what is imagined.
Renda’s stone-arch works are part of The Scenic Route, a group show at Vertical Gallery in Chicago alongside Laura Catherwood and Jerome Tiunayan running through September 27. These pieces encourage a reconsideration of the visible: the way light, sky, nature, and structure interact to shape meaning. Renda’s art suggests that the spaces around us — windows, walls, gardens — carry stories; the cracks in sky or the shadow in an arch remind us of multiple layers of reality, each one both separate and intimately connected.
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