WTI Magazine #6 2013 Nov, 22
Author : Enrico De Iulis Translation by: Alessandra Bitetti
Among the innumerable participations in the Biennal's stands dedicated to "The Encyclopedic Palace" in the Venice gardens, you'll bump into a room that is little more than a bad-lighted vestibule, a tight passage between two much larger rooms where are placed four monochrome works dated 1968, painted by Domenico Gnoli. They are not so popular, but wonderful.
Domenico Gnoli is a mid-1900s painter. He was born in Rome. His mother was a ceramist and his father was an art historian in 1933, so he grew up during the Fascist regime. He spent his teen years in touch with the wonderful artistic atmosphere of those Roman times and studying with all the works of Antonio Donghi and Francesco Trombadori.
In the fifties he moved to New York where he summarized his style and created those repertoire that immediately we all recognize as his own. He painted details of daily life, especially clothes, part of hairstyles or furniture's elements. Collars, buttons, eyelets, zips, partings, locks and seats are faithfully reproduced; they are suspended in a relaxed and melancholy domestic quiet. He described the silent visions of the objects that we use or wear thousand times during our day and he expressed them as abnormal, very close and at the same time dreamlike and fixed, with subtle colors, very balanced, wedged in a meticulous and accurate designed grid.
They are very close-up paintings that, in addition to focus on one point, exclude everything is all around, evoking and rendering us clear why those objects are a part of our day.
The quiet of Domenico Gnoli's paintings is well-known from everyone. It's the calm of the sunday morning, the warmth of the sun coming through the window in a late spring day; they are are the everyday dressing gestures that acquire an iconic elevation through the objects that we use, as the nodes of the ties or the empty slots waiting for the arrival of the button. In those daily gestures and in those rarefied atmosphere, there is a stroke of melancholy that direct one's glance on the texture of the fabric of the pants, on the pattern of the bedspread or on of your lover's back of the neck where a perfect knotted braid lies. Everyday objects become everyday subjects.
But this year there was something more at the Biennial. It's about a series of works painted with a mixed technique made by ink, tempera and acrylics but resulting monochromatic, as a print, entitled "What is a monster ?". Together with the technique, the pleasure of the works of Gnoli changes too: this series looks like a work of Escher or Magritte, but engraved by Durer. There are fantastic beasts created by taking parts of various animals that actually exist, and that are placed in everyday situations such as bathing in a bathtub, being seated on a sofa or getting a cab. Even here we find objects typical of the main Gnoli works, but this time they are seen from a distance, becoming part of the setting of the experience of these bourgeois and citizen "monsters".
The result is a wonderful fantastic and ironic interpretation of the Italian middle-class lifestyle. That ironic operation on the bourgeois taste, begun by Piero Fornasetti years before with the furnishings, it's finished and defined by Domenico Gnoli's paintings in the 1968. Two years later he died, at the age of 37, leaving an unforgettable mark on the Italian art of the twentieth century.
