Review: Portals

The mystery itself is the doorway to to all understanding (Tao, Verse 1)

Portals are the means of entrance or exit. Usually, they are grand and imposing, like the gateway to an ancient city or kingdom. To pass through a portal is to be admitted into a new world.

Once upon a time, portal was a word used for prayer book--a means for leaving behind one realm for another, of being transformed. Passage through either of these types of portal can be a right, a rite, or a random opportunity.

New Fairfield, Connecticut, artists Mary Lou and Robert Alberetti have presented their interpretation of portals in their combined art exhibit called "Portals" at the Marie Louise Trichet Art Gallery at Wisdom House Retreat and Conference Center in Litchfield, Connecticut. The show will be on exhibit from now until April 19. The gallery is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

"Portals are vehicles that bring us into new life. In the ancient world, portals invited citizens and strangers into the life of the city within. This exhibit explores Mary Lou and Robert Alberetti's experiences of the mystery of portals," says Sr. Jo-Ann Iannotti, OP, who is art and spirituality coordinator at Wisdom House.

Mary Lou, an art professor at Southern Connecticut State University, who has traveled to Europe to research and experience the subject of her works, is a sculptor whose works combine her love for texture, color, and ancient design. Her works are paintings in clay that interpret the many-layered history of all walks of life as a shared story and offer a way of bringing the ancient world into the present.

"My works are not meant to be historically accurate pieces but to suggest their time and place. They are layered because I hope to invite the viewer to look into the past and imagine the people and the times of those periods," says Mary Lou.

Robert Alberetti, an art professor at Western Connecticut State University, is likewise fascinated by portals, though he sees light and shadows rather than architecture as passages to new visions of reality. "Light can draw you into a situation, like a portal. Color is one of my real passions, and I'm interested in capturing its effect on the emotions, so I work abstractly rather than literally."

The Alberettis' works are abstractions, finely expressed responses to light, air, space, and place. They draw the past into the present and place it in the imagination, that the viewer might make it his or her own and reimagine reality altogether.

(Click here to watch an interview with the Alberettis.)