David Castillo presents a solo exhibition by Giancarlo Venturini: Woods, a series of paintings reflecting on the natural world, queer spaces, gay life, and the ritualistic symbology of them all.

The twelve oil paintings comprising Woods are drawn from a moment during one of Venturini’s trips to Poland, where he’s traveled annually for the last decade. Many of Gdańsk, Poland’s beaches are flanked by forests, dotted with birch trees and pine trees, salted by the sea. It was in woods like these where Venturini saw, by chance, a group of cruisers, who’d found among the pines a safe place for connection, intimacy, and play.

Venturini became interested in literally and figuratively queering that landscape. In works like “Guiders Through the Crowd” (2025), the forest’s birch trees glow and shine like beacons; tapped with spiles and leaking amber, they’re anthropomorphized. The trees in “Sneak Peeks” (2025), rendered in a kaleidoscopic palette of blue-greens and reds, don’t just spill liquid but observe with wide-open eyes, steady and easily camouflaged. Venturini’s forest watches the cruisers, joins them, protects them.

Other symbols recur: prismatic gemstones, bow-tied ribbons, and marbles dangle from branches and trunks, and flames illuminate and melt their surroundings. The encounter in the woods reminded Venturini, he says, of alternative ways of living. He developed a visual lexicon using Polish folk craft and mythology, exploring the possibility of utilizing these icons in his own life, for his own dreams. The woods lure cruisers with bells. “Tree of Lineage” (2025) depicts an abstracted pajak, a Polish chandelier—an enmarbled eye, a diamond, and a red bow are its charms.

The woods of Gdańsk are part of Europe’s Baltic mixed forest ecoregion, where water meets lowland forest. Regions like these might be inherently queer in their duality, both earth and sea, and the seclusion of the trees provides cover for cruising, for imagining the future. The eyes of Venturini’s birch trees are a play on their literal, real-life eyes: ovular scars formed when lower branches fall off, as if the transformation grants them the ability to see. The woods watch, unjudging. Perhaps later, they dream.

Giancarlo Venturini lives and works in New Jersey. He received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and his BFA in Painting and Sculpting from the Mason Gross School of Art and Design at Rutgers University.