about

Emilio de la Morena is a London-based artist currently undertaking an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. His practice draws on personal memory and lived experience to examine the political dimensions of queerness, particularly in relation to visibility, masking, and the performance of identity.

His recent work focuses on the concepts of queer masking and “straight passing,” exploring how identities are negotiated, concealed, or performed within social space. Rooted in the understanding that to be queer is inherently political, his paintings reflect on moments where visibility becomes both a risk and a strategy.

Working with layered tulle, de la Morena constructs images that are partially obscured, fragmented, and unstable. Paint is pushed through from the reverse of the surface, creating blurred, diffused forms that resist clarity. This process produces a hazy, almost spectral image, something between presence and disappearance, mirroring the instability of memory and the ambiguity of perceived identity.

These works draw on specific memories and coded encounters, referencing the visual language of queer cruising. Influenced by Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographic series The Park, de la Morena engages with ideas of looking, concealment, and mediated visibility. Like Yoshiyuki’s subjects, his figures and scenes exist in a space of partial revelation, where desire, surveillance, and anonymity intersect.

The resulting paintings occupy an in-between state: neither fully image nor abstraction, neither fully visible nor hidden. They function as both surface and mask, suggesting that identity itself can operate as a kind of layered construction, something performed, filtered, and continually negotiated.