When Luca Guadagnino began thinking about posters for his latest film Queer, in which Daniel Craig plays an American expat picking up men in Mexico City, one artist immediately sprang to mind. The director had been following Jake Grewal for several years, quite taken with his intensely personal romanticism. Grewal, in turn, had been quite taken with Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. So it was a meeting of minds. “I showed Luca this painting,” says Grewal, gesturing to a beautiful canvas depicting two embracing figures. “And he said, ‘That’s amazing. It’s basically my film!’”
Grewal’s ghostly sketch now features on special edition posters for Queer, ostensibly portraying the film’s main protagonists, Craig and Drew Starkey, in a moment of closeness, of even merging into one – perhaps after they’ve taken ayahuasca, the film being loosely based on William S Burroughs’ 1985 novella of the same name. The director rightly identified such intimacies as a constant theme of Grewal’s work, in which feelings of absence and longing infiltrate his depictions of naked male figures, lost in nature or at one with it.
