Gladstone Gallery presents World Without End, an exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based artist Aaron Gilbert. Known for his paintings that probe the distance between individuals and their communities, the private and the public, and the real and the conjured, Gilbert imagines the personal narratives that quietly unfold in the corners of our shared societal structures. Guided by myth, an uncanny sense of timelessness, and the artist’s deep interest in storytelling, these emotionally tender tableaux examine how individuals maintain their humanity in a historical moment punctuated by crisis, the looming peril of systemic collapse, and the increasingly totalizing velocity of consumer-driven desires.
While Gilbert’s subjects are often locked in moments of intimate exchange—we might see a couple in a bathroom together, a parent holding their child, an elderly man gazing wearily from a hospital bed—these interactions are nearly always mediated by the literal and symbolic confinement that typifies contemporary urban life. Referencing the containers that define city spaces (including storefronts, apartments, and even our own bodies), Gilbert investigates the complex emotional theater that plays out within all interiorities.
Typically inspired by moments from his own personal life, brief glimpses of interactions he’s observed between strangers, or an amalgamation of both, Gilbert’s work is particularly focused on endowing his subjects with the agency to circumvent the power structures that dictate their lives. Often including windows, plastic sheeting, glass, and other transparent barricades, Gilbert’s paintings probe the invisible mechanisms that quarantine us from one another. Exploring the limitations of even the most familiar of relationships, the artist imagines his subjects subverting the nearly inexorable systems of social taxonomy that have been instituted to organize and control our mutual understanding of desire, love, and community.
Gilbert’s paintings are often illuminated by the familiar glow of neon logos, halogen bulbs, or the hot orange tinge of summer sunsets oxymoronically improved by pollution. With his use of light and details that indicate a world touched by magical realism, the artist quietly suggests that his figures’ personal interactions extend beyond their relationship to goods, social frameworks, and the world as we know it. Amplifying the strange portals that join surrealism to reality, Gilbert allows us to glimpse a world hidden beneath the prosaic veneer of our organizing principles.
The artist has cited sources including devotional retablos, George Tooker, and Diego Rivera as influences, and his own work suggests a philosophical conflation of all three. Addressing both the dehumanizing qualities of contemporary life as well as the significance of the individual, Gilbert often looks at the myths generated by consumerism as an entry point to addressing cultural crisis. Interrogating the illusion of a choice-based identity offered under the mantle of capitalism, the artist frequently incorporates corporate logos in his work, including the Adidas and AT&T symbols that appear throughout this exhibition. Looming large in his dreamscapes, these familiar emblems seem to function as 21st century replacements for the mystical hieroglyphics of another time, their vacuum of meaning highlighting contemporary culture’s attachment to totems stripped of all spiritual significance. Juxtaposing intimate narratives with the dystopic depersonalization generated by commodity fetishism, Gilbert’s fictions search for the moments of magical connection that occur both on our city blocks, and behind other people’s walls.
