Erin Cluley Gallery is pleased to announce Star-crossed, an exhibition of new and recent works by Baltimore-based artist René Treviño. Recognized for their technical skill and expansive frame of historical reference, Treviño’s paintings reinterpret symbols from astrology, art history, and global cultures. His interdisciplinary works include painting, collage, fiber sculpture, and printmaking that dissect signs and their political and cultural meanings. Star-crossed brings together art from the last five years of Treviño’s practice, with new works, to reimagine how cultures derive meaning and stake claims in the terrestrial sphere and cosmos.

Treviño’s approach to historical reference reimagines cultural symbols with a queer, progressive sensibility. His star chart paintings reuse Victorian diagrams replacing Greco-Roman mythology in astrology with Spanish language. The artist’s Regalia series blend elements of Western European and Indigenous Mesoamerican royal garments. Presented in repeated series, Treviño’s fusions flatten cultural and generational divisions to imagine diverse futures.

The title of Treviño’s newest solo presentation refers to the Shakespearean phrase coined in the playwright’s sixteenth-century tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, stemming from an ancient belief in astrology’s connection to human fate. Alluding to the artist’s star chart paintings and collages, Star-crossed expresses his art’s tongue-in-cheek humor and reverence for pop cultural icons.

The exhibition will feature a selection of works from the artist’s Celestial body-ody-ody series (2020-2023). Rendered in bright palettes and embellished, these circular paintings depict planets, species of coral, an Aztec disk, planets, and recreations of Albrecht Dürer’s Knot engravings. Displayed in tight rows, these symbols problematize ideas of institutional claim and ownership over objects and environments.

While the works arise from historical research, Star-crossed expresses Treviño’s artistic conception of futurity; a point down the line where legacies of colonialism and cultural repression are dissolved into equities and reparations.

Star-crossed will be the artist’s fifth solo presentation with Erin Cluley Gallery. It will be exhibited concurrently with Alexa Brooks’ Patterns of catastrophe.