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.
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Domenico Gnoli
Chemiste Verte
1967
Acrylic and sand on canvas
73 x 55 inches
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Domenico Gnoli
Braid
1969
Acrylic and sand on canvas
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Domenico Gnoli
Corner
1968
Acrylic and sand on canvas
67 x 51 inches |
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Domeinco Gnoli
Striped Shirt Lapel
1969
Acrylic and sand on canvas
57 ½ x 44 ½ inches
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Domenico Gnoli
Due Dormienti
1966
Acrylic and sand on canvas
50 ¾ x 39 1/3
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Domenico Gnoli
Curly Red Hair
1969
Acrylic and Sand on canvas
79 x 55 inches
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Domenico Gnoli
Poltrona
1966
Acrylic and sand on canvas
39 1/3 x 51 inches
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