These are pictures of a summer that we’ve all experienced in one way or another. Greek photographer Spyros Renntstrings together scenes of an endless vacation day where there are no deadlines or submissions due. Only the sunset marks the change from day to night. Rennt walks around the houses with friends and looks at the blood-red sky over the sea. Along the way, he meets acquaintances and strangers, drifts from dance floor to dance floor until everyone is exhausted, intertwined, sweaty and in love on a sofa at dawn. Too awake to sleep. Too tired to move. Photographs from the last eight years are seen in his largest solo exhibition, “Kiss Against the Fire“, at the new Rosegarden project space. They take you to Greek beaches and Berlin clubs that no longer exist. Spyros Rennt succeeds in radically portraying queerness without exhibiting it.
His camera zooms in close but is never voyeuristic. What all the images have in common is the euphoria of a warm August night and the Sunday anxiety inherent in every vacation. Excess and boredom are not mutually exclusive in his pictures. They flow into each other as naturally as Campari and soda. What appears liberated is always political. Rennt deservedly belongs to a new generation of photographers who depict the inclusive attitude to life in the present as directly and unembellished as Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz did before them in New York in the 1980s. Because, even almost fifty years later, we still need art that offers resistance, and burns brightly for a life in which bodies know no boundaries.
Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Joanna Wilk, Spyros Rennt
Rosegarden by Frontrose, Potsdamer Str.98A, 10785 Berlin–Tiergarten; map
Spyros Rennt – Kiss Against the Fire until 30.05.2025
@spyressence
@frontrose.global
