Aaron Gilbert “Psychic Novellas”

Lyles & King

[Image: Aaron Gilbert "Navient (Debts That are Never Repaid)" (2016) Oil on canvas, 27 x 32.5 in.]

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Aaron Gilbert imbues his paintings with a radical attention. His meticulous compositions, worked and reworked, insist upon connection: between a person and their environment, between other people, between the art of today and disparate art histories. In these quietly charged domestic scenes, women and men—many of whom resemble the artist—sift meaning from chaos, from the violence, love, and beauty surrounding them. They embrace, cook dinner. Their fingers touch. Gilbert paints that eyelash of light between intimacy and isolation, between the mythic and curbside, in the half-dream state where we spend most of our lives.

Gilbert is the son of political radicals who moved from Washington, D.C. to rustbelt Pennsylvania, and whose own ambitions for bringing about transformative social change quickly collapsed. Born in 1979, one year after a generation’s hopes met tragedy in Jonestown, Gilbert grew up among remnants of social idealism, in proximity to poverty and domestic violence. Finding meaning and love in that social and historical wreckage has become the focus of Gilbert’s practice. Forty years later, as widespread social movements are looked to once again to usher in progressive change, Gilbert’s work attends equally to the complex messiness of our personal lives, and the potential to engage in history in a transformative way.

Having become a father prior to attending art school, the domestic became a stage in which Gilbert treats social issues as modern day mythology. Included in this exhibition is a portrait of the artist’s eldest son, Judah. The background of the painting is inlaid mother of pearl: a material tied to myths of transformation—of lightning striking the ocean—and thus the ideal surface on which to represent the emergence of heroic potential.

The portrait is modelled off the Egyptian Fayum paintings, some of the world’s earliest portraits. To look at them today is to be struck by their immediacy. John Berger wrote that they “come to us from a moment of historical transition. And something of the precariousness of this moment is visible in the way the faces are painted.” It is perhaps the precarity that drew Gilbert to these works, and to his other reference points throughout art history. The New Objectivity of Christian Schad and Otto Dix; the profane profundity of Alfredo Vilchis Roque, and the braided inner cartography and class consciousness of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; Kerry James Marshall, Giotto, George Tooker: all of these artists painted one world in order to usher another into being.

Gilbert looks to older tradition not to mine affect, but to synthesize, to update, their different approaches to mythology. These influences come up against one another within the symbolic perspectival spaces of his compositions. Mundanity is charged with Magic Realism. Like in a Borges story, the everyday shift into the metaphysical. Gilbert paints these visionary works slowly and methodically, allowing their narratives to evolve over time. Figures shift, meaning is never settled. In viewing them, that same patience reconfigures itself into a demand for empathy and attention. “What is our mandate to be agents of change to bring about social justice in the world?” Gilbert asks. “How does this spill into our most intimate relationships; with our children, with our partners?”

Psychic Novellas is Aaron Gilbert’s first New York solo exhibition and it will include paintings from the past eight years. He has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. He was born in 1979 and his work is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.