Domenico Gnoli, who died at the age of 36 in 1970, was an Italian artist of international sensitivity and enormous originality, who met people like Laurence Olivier and Italo Calvino, Jean-Louis Barrault and Robert Graves, Cecil Beaton and Ernst Fuchs in his life. An isolated man who did not recognize himself in his contemporary artistic currents: often confused with Pop Art, of which he was, if anything, a precursor. Fondazione Prada, particularly intrigued by outsiders, dedicates a great exhibition to him running until February 27, the last one conceived by Germano Celant, and reconstructs his path in more than one hundred works and as many drawings, dated from 1949 to 1969.
Gnoli, son and grandson of art critics and enfant prodige, began with graphics and illustration and worked for a long time in the theater, creating sketches and sets in Rome, Paris and London and also acting in small parts. He was also a formidable collaborator of magazines and editorial series, thanks to his drawings certain travel reports from South America for the monthlies and, for example, an exquisite Einaudi English edition of the “Baron rampant”: this rich activity of his is documented on the first floor of the Podium, in the second part of the exhibition. On the ground floor there are instead the enigmatic canvases that have given him the most fame, made of acrylic and sand. They are the inanimate objects: shoes, ties and other items of clothing, bedspreads, bathtubs and other elements of the furniture, as well as hair, braids, curls and partings.
Reproduced with impressive material precision, enlarged, pantographed, explored, until they assume a totemic solemnity. It is the private part of Gnoli, apparently in contradiction with the graphic work played in public. Instead, together, these two faces form the complex identity of a free man, metropolitan in New York and dreamer in Mallorca. One who could write: “I paint as I please without worrying about the culture of the century and my responsibilities towards it, and in the same way I intend to live: free and faithful only to so much or little truth that I feel now”.
“Domenico Gnoli”, Fondazione Prada, largo Isarco 2, Monday-Sunday from 10 to 19, 15 euros, www.fondazioneprada.org