Thoughts That Cure Radically: Domenico Gnoli ‘Paintings 1964-1969’ Luxembourg & Dayan

Certain artists make little sense in their own time. Given the vagaries of taste, the happenstance of an artwork’s dissemination or the changing nature of a person’s practice, particular artists may be forgotten, or nearly so. Domenico Gnoli is a case in point. Gnoli’s use of an illustrational Pop sensibility was out of step with the post-war Italian critical consensus which favored Arte Povera and other post-painting conceptual gambits. Seen from our own critical vantage point, however, Gnoli’s paintings of braids, weaves, napes of dresses, crotch shots and corners of buildings seems quintessentially Italian, and contemporary, in its subject matter and sensibility. Currently eighteen of his medium sized late canvases and a suite of drawings are on view at Luxembourg & Dayan in New York that helps make the case for a reevaluation of Gnoli’s work.

Born to an art historian father and ceramicist mother in Rome in 1933, Gnoli lived a peripatetic existence, moving from Rome to Paris to London to New York. Working as a stage designer and illustrator, Gnoli found success creating the production sets for London’s Old Vic Theater as well as work with Sports Illustrated. Gnoli eventually settled on the Mediterranean island of Majorca where he married the artist Yannick Vu. Right as Gnoli’s paintings began to reach a larger audience with an exhibition of his work in New York at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1969, Gnoli died suddenly the following year.

Picking up creatively in his early thirties, Gnoli produced his most significant paintings, those currently on view in New York, in his last five years before his death at the age of 36. Painted with acrylic mixed with sand on medium to largish sized canvases, Gnoli’s paintings are an amalgam of Giorgio Morandi’s quietist sensibility and Rene Magritte’s standoffish matter-of-fact paint handling. The acrylic sand combination gives the paintings a texture that polymer typically lacks. Dry and matte, Gnoli’s surfaces resembles the clay masonry of a Roman wall. Details of everyday, bourgeois’ life stands in hieratic profile. Two buttons, a bit of curly hair, a couple sleeping underneath their bead covers, an elegantly ironed dress pant are composed with exquisite care. Gnoli’s subjects are shards of everyday life. Fragmented yet oversized, Gnoli paints a capitalist version of an ancient Roman Colossus. A visitor to Roman ruins might happen upon a gargantuan foot, or mammoth decapitated emperor’s head, just as a visitor to Gnoli’s late paintings will experience, in crystalline hyper detail, the intricacies of a post-war Italian office worker’s fly, or the top of Nona’s frumpy dress. Curt and sardonic, Gnoli is heir to de Chirico’s Pittura metafisica. The crown of a man’s head may seem a diminishment from Roman statuary, but Gnoli’s scabrous surface and intention diminutively triumphs.