Domenico Gnoli’s Dizzying Closeups of the Everyday
The seventeen paintings in “The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli,” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, will induce a kind of perceptual whiplash. They seem static on first approach—enlarged trousers, neckties, torsos, and furniture—but the scale of things is in constant flux. One moment, you’re looking at an enormous shirt collar, and feel like a mosquito approaching it; the next, you’re a child standing at the foot of a bed, or a tiny ghost hovering over it. The paintings lavish a warmth of attention on everyday objects but feel emotionally chilled, almost frigid. At times they seem simpleminded and empty, at others complicated and full. They have the air of a benevolent scam.
Gnoli isn’t well known in the U.S., but I’d guess that’s going to change. His paintings are crowd-pleasers that double as art-historical riddles. Play the taxonomy game with his work—Pop? Op? Surrealism? Photorealism?—and it splinters in curious ways. One could think of him as René Magritte with a magnifying glass, and without the philosophical jokes, but that’s not exactly fair. Gnoli was born in Rome, in 1933. First, he had the patrimony of the Renaissance to deal with. (His father was an art historian.) Then he had to look down the barrel of twentieth-century Italy, home to perhaps the most contradictory avant-garde in Europe. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the techno-fascist founder of Futurism, ran around with a bloodthirsty smile, shrieking about how much he loved Mussolini and automobiles. Giorgio de Chirico peddled his metaphysical pictures as a cure to modernism. By the sixties, when Gnoli was in his prime, Piero Manzoni was stuffing his own shit into cans (“Artist’s Shit”) and blowing his breath into balloons (“Artist’s Breath”), and Arte Povera was inviting horses into galleries. Gnoli looked around and decided he would do something a little more visually appealing.
When Gnoli was a child, his mother, a ceramicist, encouraged his early talent for drawing, while his father educated him about architecture and urged him to become a painter. At eighteen, Gnoli was designing sets for theatrical productions and had his first solo show in Rome. He worked mostly with ink at this point, his style a baroque variation on Surrealism: a loose, expressive line put in service of fantastical architecture with twisting stairs, wobbly loggias, and buttresses to nowhere. (Dalí, who visited Rome in 1948, to design sets for a Shakespeare production, was a clear influence.) Eventually, Gnoli chafed at the communal atmosphere of theatre and began to illustrate magazines and books, though he still kept a toe in the art world.
There’s a room at Lévy with some of Gnoli’s preparatory sketches, and unfortunately they don’t give an adequate sense of how talented a draftsman he was (or became). By the end of the fifties, he’d tightened his line and tilted the picture plane forward, like a pinball machine, stuffing every inch of a composition until it was as busy as a Bruegel print. “Improbable Bazaar” (1959), for Harper’s Bazaar, turns a street market into a game of chutes and ladders, with stalls of pottery stacked on top of each other, a cow being conveyed across a gangplank, and a barbershop operating on stilts. Gnoli did wonderful vignettes of city life in Rome, but also on his travels in New Orleans, London, and New York City. Among the books he illustrated were “Alberic the Wise,” by Norton Juster, and “The Baron in the Trees,” by Italo Calvino. Calvino was so smitten with Gnoli’s work that he wrote a set of four “still-lifes” in the artist’s mode, each a literary enlargement of a Gnolian object: a button, a lady’s shoe, a man’s shirt, and a pillow.
The best part of this exhibition is the Bed Room. It has six paintings of beds, but the effect is less Mattress Firm and more “stages of life.” In one, a bed has its sheet turned down, its surface taut and unused—a blank slate. In another, a couple is mid-coitus, the act described only through the topological features of a paisley blanket: a spread pair of legs, heads and fingers poking above the sheet. A less amorous couple appears in another painting, one a back sleeper and one a side sleeper, a foot apart spatially and a mile apart emotionally. Then there’s a bed with a clamshell impression on the pillow. The person is gone but the bed is still there, solid and heavy as a stone. It feels like a monument to which we should pay tribute.
Consistent with Gnoli’s work from the mid-sixties onward, the beds take up the entire composition, besides a wedge of floor or wall to anchor the furniture. In a letter to his mother, Gnoli wrote:
That’s how straightforward Gnoli’s recipe was—an isolated, centrally positioned object. Move the perspective a little back, or move the object to the side, and comparisons rush in. I’d argue that the Balthus and Magritte references are misleading, though. Gnoli’s pictures have a weight often lacking from those of the other two. In “Il grande letto azzurro” (“The Big Azure Bed”), from 1965, the pillows aren’t fluffy clouds; they look like concrete empanadas. Get up close and observe the grit of the surface—Gnoli often mixed sand into his paint—and the pigment doesn’t seem applied by a brush so much as spackled onto the canvas. Gnoli’s art-historical preferences tended toward what he called “non-eloquent” painting. He liked coarse simplicity.
At its weakest, Gnoli’s work defaults to gimmicks. “Back View” (1968), a painting of the reverse side of a painting, reprises an idea that’s at least as old as Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts’s “The Reverse of a Framed Painting” (circa 1670). Then there are pieces like the M. C. Escher-esque “Corner” (1968), which puts you eye to eye with the corner of a brick wall and makes your vision twitch, and “Apple” (1968), a gigantic apple with a slice removed, conveniently turning it into a vulva. This is the same Gnoli who rotates the “Mona Lisa” a hundred and eighty degrees, so that all we see is the back of her head. Ha-ha. But so what?
The most interesting features of these works are their incidentals. The bricks have bits of hair (presumably Gnoli’s) caught in the surface; the apple looks as if it’s been pocked with grapeshot. When people call Gnoli a practitioner of Pop, they’re thinking almost exclusively about his magnification of objects. (Roy Lichtenstein’s painting “Magnifying Glass” might as well be the unofficial mascot of the movement.) But there’s a distinctly un-American flavor to Gnoli’s work which troubles its status as Pop. His rough surfaces recall the rustic walls of an old European city, and his pantry of humble objects—which have none of the New World glitz of gleaming Chevrolets or fast food—evoke a slightly older Italy than his own. Although he was painting on the heels of Il Boom—the “economic miracle” that swept Italy, in the late fifties and early sixties, when TV sets, fridges, and Fiats flooded the market—his items are decidedly rearguard.
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I’m tempted to flag two French literary movements of the fifties and sixties, rather than any one movement in art, as Gnoli’s true spiritual lineage. Like the so-called nouveau roman, or “new novel,” with its exhaustive descriptions of common objects, and Oulipo, with its ludic constraints (the famous example is “A Void,” a novel by Georges Perec, written without the letter “e”), Gnoli’s paintings both rigorously depict and rigorously constrain. He spent the early fifties in Paris—learning how to paint and engaging with an international community of artists—and it’s possible that the emergent French literature appealed to him. But the kinship is more one of sensibility than influence.
Take “Red Tie Knot” (1969), which pushes the Gnolian method to the extreme, focussing so closely on every ridgelet of thread that the tie becomes almost unrecognizable. It recalls Raymond Roussel’s “La vue” (“The View”), the poem that inspired the nouveau roman by devoting hundreds of lines to a single miniature photograph, describing it with enough detail to effectively disappear it. The Oulipian element kicks in with the subtraction: removing the area around an article of clothing, so that you seem to be looking at it through a paper-towel roll or a jeweller’s loupe. Both techniques combine to make the object strange. When I first saw “Red Tie Knot,” from across the gallery, it looked like two glistening sheets of muscle. Then I decided that it was a quivering abstraction, à la Op art. If still-life is what art historians have called “rhopography”—the art of painting lowly things—then Gnoli didn’t just master the form; he expanded its limits by shrinking them.
In 1968, Gnoli received a letter from the gallerist Sidney Janis, who offered him a solo show. Gnoli was over the moon: Janis had helped launch the career of Jackson Pollock, and his gallery, in New York City, was the venue of Gnoli’s dreams. The artist spent a year at his home in Mallorca in a frenzy of productivity, creating more than forty large-scale paintings. The show opened in December of 1969; Andy Warhol attended, as did Larry Rivers, Diana Vreeland, and Gnoli’s mother. It was the high point of his professional life. But, just a few months later, Gnoli was admitted to Columbia Presbyterian, with cancer. He died in April, at the age of thirty-six. The tragedy casts a shadow over his body of work. One imagines his final days: the world getting smaller, reduced to a chair, a bed, the pattern of a blanket—the detail growing until, in the end, it was everything. ♦