There is a splendid photograph by Federico Patellani in which a woman from behind, lying down, looks at the carcass of a plane, with one ankle slightly tilted over the other. It’s a detail photo. Her face is not seen, and this fuels the mystery, the desire, the curiosity and the urge to look again and again. The effect is similar to that of entering Domenico Gnoli’s works, where the enlarged details become part of a larger whole, but buried, hidden, only imagined, like the consistent – but not visible – of an iceberg. In the retrospective conceived by Germano Celant, critic, curator and artistic director of Fondazione Prada who, who passed away in April 2020, was unable to see the final result of the exhibition, more than 100 works created by Gnoli between 1949 and 1969 were brought together. , with the upper floor of the exhibition dedicated to his work as a set designer and illustrator.
More than 50 years after the death of Gnoli
The result, more than 50 years after the death of Gnoli (New York, 1970), is absolutely contemporary in the representation of the image, because in this exhibition Gnoli’s works tell of an environment, a context, a status, tightening the focus on a roundup of details at close range.
The newspaper and the context
That close distance was explained in his time by Gnoli himself with the use of “given and simple elements”, taken individually to narrate a multitude, without “adding or subtracting anything”, almost as in poetry. Gnoli said of himself that his work isolated and represented, looking at current events and “familiar situations of everyday life”. And so, the enlargement of buttons, ties, the shadows inside the pockets of trousers, the half-open zippers, the piece of watch that emerges from the perfectly white and impeccably ironed shirt, are presences that tell a story, without the need to make more, without the urgency to widen the gaze even more. And indeed, paradoxically, narrowing the vision on the surfaces, inside waves of hair, curves of bodies, silhouettes of human forms never fully revealed.
A label-free artistic practice
The retrospective is part of a series of exhibitions that Fondazione Prada has dedicated over time to figures such as Edward Kienholz, Leon Golub and William Copley, who are difficult to assimilate to the main artistic movements of the second half of the twentieth century. The aim of the exhibition is to try to explore label-free artistic practices, despite the tradition of Italian painting and artists such as Bacon, Magritte have influenced Gnoli’s work. However, there is more: the use of color, the absences that appear in the folds of unmade sheets or armchairs shaded by the imprint of a seat just left, the two-dimensionality that sometimes acquires depth, the importance of matter in the use of techniques such as sand on canvas, they connote a certain attention to small things, apparently the least important, to complete a reality that can be read or reread with different values.
Domenico Gnoli, Prada Foundation, Milan, Largo Isarco 2, 20139, Milan, curated by Germano Celant