SENSORING : THE SKY PORTALS. 2019-22

The Sky Portals are part of a series of sensory artworks, developed from Gilbert’s preceding work “Portable Portals,” further dramatising the premise of the Axis Mundi. They have been shown internationally in “Sensoring” in Cyprus and most recently at Arusha Gallery, London, in collaboration with Tate Publishing in the group show for Ithell Colquhoun’s Sex Magic launch.

Following Louise Bourgeois’s counsel to look up for inspiration, Gilbert’s Sky Portals, or more playfully titled “Furescos” (paintings made from inherited offcuts of hand-dyed fur salvaged from the fashion industry), turn the ceiling of the gallery space into a quivering skyscape. They shift the focus of the gaze away from grounded and pictorial concerns, beckoning the mind to lose itself in realms of reverie and wonder. The oval represents the sacred geometry of the Vesica Piscis, a conduit between the celestial and the terrestrial.

These Furescos, recalling the religious and Renaissance paintings of celestial bodies found in grand palazzos, churches, and temples, operate as contemporary installations, offering a way back to otherwise mysterious realms: to the metaphysical background of the world, the invisible, the unsaid, the felt. A world of magic and mayhem, a portal to perception, a hypnagogic dreamscape.

Gilbert sees the artist as a sensor or sense organ, the first line of defense, sending outputted information to the hive mind of the collective.

“I sit and make the portals, soft fur quivers in the breeze: antennae to the airwaves around, picking up each inflection, alive again, they act as somatic doorways through and out to other dimensions.”

“Gilbert’s mythical worlds intersect flexurally spatial environments with intense emotional frequencies and meanings. A Sky Portal is a doorway into the chaotic universe of emotions. It operates to reflect your emotional devolution and or evolution. The viewer becomes the receiver of this sensory cosmic investigation.

I see Bert Gilbert’s avant-garde artworks as Baroque skies, murals on ceilings of great halls of architecture and theatres, like the sky of the Teatro Olympico in Vicenza or the cosmic backgrounds that appear in Byzantine domes.”