ART CITIES:N.York-Domenico Gnoli

Domenico Gnoli was an Italian painter, illustrator and stage designer. Despite the fact that his father, an art critic, first introduced him to classical painting, in the early years Gnoli devoted himself to stage design. It was only in 1955, when he moved to New York, that he began his career as a painter. His works are characterized by the elevation of the ordinary and the mundane through the detailed depiction of domestic objects.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery Archive

Domenico Gnoli’s obsession with trivial objects betrays a certain affinity to Pop Art. Though he died at the early age of 37, just months after his enthusiastically received exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery (3/27/12/1969), Gnoli left a substantial and significant body of work that secures him a permanent place in the history of art.  The exhibition “Detail of a Detail” at Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery is the second solo exhibition of works by Domenico Gnoli, and  follows the exhibition “Domenico Gnoli: Paintings 1964-1969” (26/4-30/6/2012) that  was the first showing of Gnoli’s paintings in the United States since 1969. Melding precise attention to detail with an interest in the tokens of identity circulating among a growing postwar bourgeoisie in Italy, Gnoli’s paintings reveal an idiosyncratic eye and cinematic sensibility. “The trivial object itself, enlarged through the attention paid to it, is more important, beautiful and terrible than any fantasy could make it. It tells me more about myself than anything else, filling me with dread, disgust and delight.” This is Domenico Gnoli describes his fascination with the things surrounding us in our everyday lives, things that are accorded the role of protagonists in his pictures. Gnoli isolates these objects from their normal context, then painstakingly blows up details and finally paints these onto large-size canvasses. This method has the effect of rendering familiar objects (a tie, a wrist watch, a buttonhole) scary and overpowering, strange and magical at one and the same time. Domenico Gnoli was born into a family with ties to the arts. His father was the art historian Umberto Gnoli and his mother was a painter and ceramist. In addition to the grounding he received at home, he studied under Carlo Alberto Petrucci, who as early as 1950 encouraged him to exhibit a series of drawings at Rome’s Galleria La Cassapanda. For a short time in 1952 he attended classes in stage design at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, which he abandoned to become an actor with the Compagnia Pilotto-Carraro Miserocchi. His contact with the world of the theatre was a stepping stone to his success in designing the sets for numerous theatre productions thereafter, such as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, directed by Robert Helpmann and performed at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 1955. In 1956 Gnoli travelled to New York for his first one-man show in the United States at the Sagittarius Gallery and a year later he settled in the city, where he worked as a reputed illustrator of magazines such as Vogue and Sports Illustrated. At the beginning of the 1960s, Gnoli decided to concentrate more on his career as a painter. His realistic, immobile work was focused on representing everyday objects such as chairs, sofas and beds and was very well received by critics and a public in touch with the cult of consumer society objects and Pop sensibility. However, his work is tinged with echoes of European art movements of the first half of the century, such as Surrealism, magical realism and metaphysical painting, which set him apart from this movement of American origin. Gnoli travelled all over the world and spent the last years of his life in the town of Deià in Mallorca with his wife, the artist Yannick Vu. He died of cancer at thirty-seven at the height of his artistic career.

Info: Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, 64 East 77th Street, New York, Duration: 3/5-14/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, www.luxembourgdayan.com