Below are the excerpt I copied directly from different website talking about the works of Domenico Gnoli. This post acts as a notebook and reference for myself. Links of sources are included.
Notes: I like how Gnoli’s unfamiliar view to look at ordinary subjects. She created a sense of surreal without adding any fictional elements in the painting.
The paintings Gnoli made during his last half-decade have routinely been associated with Magritte-style Surrealism. And they have been related to Pop Art because the simplified realism borders on the cartoonish and is devoted to material goods. But those connections are misleading. Gnoli’s paintings do not involve irrational juxtapositions of crazily different objects and sizes, and though there is humor of an oddly solemn sort in them, they do not parody styles of contemporary advertising or product design.
Looking at them is more like seeing the world of home and family through the eyes of a child.
Gnoli painted these and other images on sandy textured grounds, which, along with the deftly rendered fabric patterns and details like buttons and stitching, draw you in for close examination. This makes the images seem even larger. You may recall, perhaps subconsciously, the physical, perceptually dwarfing closeness to parental bodies and the textures that enveloped them that you experienced as a child.
Monumental But Intimate: The Paintings of Domenico Gnoli
His viewpoint is a very tight close up – way past the borders of conventional personal space. It’s what you would see if you were a child being hugged in your parent’s arms, a lover embracing your sweetheart, a tailor examining the detail of a seam or button hole, or a hairdresser making final adjustments on your client’s new hairstyle. It’s not an alien point of view but it is a special one, something we don’t experience routinely.
At the same time Gnoli’s compositions seem monumental. For all their intimacy they also look like massive forms approaching the scale of Mount Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. It’s true that some of his paintings are large (six feet tall or more) but even those paintings seem like they are only hinting at the real size. Sometimes the looming shape of the main object nearly fills the rectangle of the canvas leaving just a sliver of empty space along an edge. At other times the object totally fills the rectangle and seems to extend way beyond its borders. In both instances it makes the scene appear huge, like a land form too large to accurately capture in a single painting.
Gnoli’s compositions are very formal and calculated. Precise shapes – each with their own perfectly tuned color or texture – lock together like pieces in some sort of high-stakes jigsaw puzzle. Even a casual viewer can see that nothing in these paintings has been left to chance.
His paintings are not as obsessive as the photo realist painters but because he chose such a small detail of a larger scene he needed to lavish attention on subtle nuances such as light falling on strands of hair or the translucent surface of pearl buttons. In some of his paintings the three-dimensional texture of a fabric’s weave mixes with the cloth’s printed pattern and both texture and pattern extend over the entire surface of the painting. It’s an unrelenting attention to detail that gives his paintings tremendous authenticity.
Apart from all these physical characteristics there is a pronounced but intangible “feeling” about Gnoli’s paintings. They seem eerie and magical in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of the surrealist painters Magritte and de Chirico. Yet, there is nothing overtly manipulative in Gnoli’s images. Time, space and objects are very normal here. There are no improbable juxtapositions. It is obviously just the unusual close up point of view and the carefully arranged compositions that create this psychological edge to the scenes.
A Very Sirius Archive 