Coming from a long line of antecedents, Gilbert is a painter of our new unrelenting modern life, as lived by those at the margins. He is a painter of the mystical and the ordinary, of the spiritual hidden inside the everyday. His subjects possess a strength and resilient grace under pressure.
“The bodies I depict are under the weight of capitalism. I want that force to be very present. I want it to be as dominant in the work as it is in our lives. You have the presence of these forces but then I’m interested in finding where we can access the power that can circumvent the rules of the game.”
“The sacred is what I’m invested in. Deciphering how we access a power that transcends all the material structure of this world. I would say that I operate on the idea that none of us know how powerful we are. None of us know what we’re capable of doing or why we’re here and, to me, the most interesting thing in being alive is trying to decipher that and unlock it and be a transformative force in the world.”
“I like the moments in painting history that live on a bridge between two ways of thinking, there’s these breaks of logic between Giotto for example and then Trecento, Quattrocento. Like Fra Angelico, you’re still in this world of magic, but then you’re also halfway into this world of logic and reason.”
at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome
until September 17, 2022