VISITES — JUIN 2009Conversation with Aaron Gilbert — New York
Cheong Kwon, 5 june 2009Aaron Gilbert is a painter whose work I first saw at Jeffrey Deitch last October. I bumped into him recently during open studios at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, where he is a resident artist. Aaron Gilbert (b. 1979) holds an MFA in painting from Yale University and a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He lives and works in New York City.
CK : - This is the second time I’ve seen your work, and suddenly, when I saw you in person, something snapped into place because there is such a seamless connection between you and your work, and I understood the work on a different level, and felt like your work is all about self portraiture. Would you agree?
AG : - It’s possible. Maybe an extended self-portraiture which reaches out to several different people around me, those people who have had an influence on me.
CK : - Is it that you try to capture a personal moment that speaks to more universal truths? There are always these very intimate moments that happen in your paintings; an almost a surreal energy between the figures, or just intense energy, so I was wondering if you specifically had an emotional, psychological or personal experience which you are trying to paint that out in a scene ?
AG : - Yes, I think so, sometimes the location or the specifics of the scene are invented, like I’ll substitute one thing that happened, and / or the scene might be a metaphor for the direct representation of something that I’ve experienced. One thing I think about a lot is that you can speak metaphorically to universal things that effect not only just individuals, but societies. I do a lot of etchings and many of them are erotic or intimate scenes, but I think you can use an erotic image to tell a narrative about much larger things, like events that happened between nations, or between families of people.
CK : - So in this painting (painting of two people about to embrace), what do you feel metaphorically you are trying to represent ?
AG : - This one is a little harder for me to talk about because what I intended and what happened was different. I really wanted to just paint a love scene, and have that be where it started from, But I think there are a lot of complicated things going on, so I don’t think you can say the mood is homogenous. On the one hand you have an embrace that is very intimate, on the other hand there is a little more distance between than I intended.
CK : - Yes, it’s intimate, but it’s clear there is a psychological distance. To me it looks like she’s pushing him down and he’s holding her head very tight, and there is this physical tension where neither of them are relaxed. It makes for a very powerful psychological scene. It could be tender but at the same time there is a lot of hesitation.
AG : - I think everything turns out different from what you intend, and the more you let go of your own agenda, the more you can be happy with the result.
CK : - What is your take on portraiture in general. Why do it, what draws you to it ?
AG : - Portraiture is about freezing someone in a moment of their existence - a interesting way to locate a person. I think there are times when I want to hold onto a person and I want them to stay, and in those moments, I want there to be portrait of them that exists.
I don’t think there is an inherent interest in portraiture, it’s what you do with it. My take on what portraiture is, is related to my take on what people are, and I fluxuate on thinking of people as having a single unified identity and thinking of people as vehicles who have a lot of conflicting identities and selves. And I think portraiture really asserts the idea that we have a unified self that’s inherent to who we are...
But a lot of my work, I wouldn’t consider portraiture, I consider the people in my work to be vehicles that are empty containers. In my paintings, I want the viewers to be able to insert themselves into any of the humans equally.
So if there are three people, I want all three to be the access point. Not that one is the dominant figure.
CK : - Regarding this very intense psychological aspect to the figures in your paintings, one feels the emotion or lack thereof related to each figure and at the same time the technique with which its’ painted is staid, practiced and well executed, and in a sense, quiet but masterful. You don’t get the intensity of emotion in the technique of the painting but you do get it in the expression of the figures. Is there a spiritual message you are trying to express ?
AG : - You could say spiritual but I’m not interested in trying to marry it with any historical or tightly formed narrative. I think humans can evolve culturally and that is what I’m most concerned with…by that, I think that as creatures, we have a potential we haven’t met yet or achieved, and the only way we can do that is by being balanced inwardly, and I think you can view how inwardly balanced a person is by the way they interact with the people who they are intimately connected to...
CK : - You’re speaking about the human capacity to evolve further. Do you feel its’ the artists role to bring that evolution about? What do you feel the artists’ role is ?
AG : - I think that is everyone’s role and I think there are a lot of different ways and paths to bring that about - any belief system is a vehicle and you can drive in any direction with that vehicle, and I don’t think all vehicles are equally useful, and the significance of what person does or where they come from isn’t dependant on the vehicle.
CK : - When did this body of work begin ?
AG : - I would say it started to take shape about 4 years ago, my last year as a grad student at RISD. My son was born. I started late. That’s when I started to have an idea of what I wanted my work to be about.
It is important to me that with my work, a person doesn’t need a background in contemporary art history to be able to get meaning out of a work. That’s a large part of the reason why I do figurative work.
CK : - What direction do you want to take your work from here ?
AG : - That’s a good question. I can tell you what I’ve been thinking about a lot. I’ve been more interested in making these paintings to be more objects that have images on them, than images that have a support. I’ve been thinking about the paintings as objects and how they live in a space, how they live with people and how they exist in the environment where the owner places them. I’m interested in a painting, where during different times of the day, as the lighting changes, the image itself shifts or the way you read it shifts. Or a painting a person could have with them in their home or with them for an extended period and reveal new things over time.
* Photo: Cheong Kwon
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