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Lot Essay
Painted during the apex of the late high period of Domenico Gnoli's tragically short career, Pocket was executed only a few short months before the artist's immensely successful show at the trail-blazing Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, and his subsequent ill-fated death to cancer in 1970 at the age of thirty-six. A leading illustrator and successful stage designer in his early career, Gnoli emerged as Italy's modern bohemian dandy, ripe with an abundance of talent and a vision unlike any of his time. A masterpiece of his mature oeuvre, Pocket is an iconic example of Gnoli's stylish canvases, which culled secondary details from the fashions of the 1960s and magnified them into the primary subject of his remarkably scaled canvases, exploiting his subject's elegant array of pattern, texture and detail. Focusing on that which is so exceptionally ordinary, Pocket magnifies reality into the abstraction of the surreal--reevaluating our understanding of the world around us, so that the ordinary is reborn in the viewer's minds as that which is extraordinary.
Set within the grand scale of its canvas, the immense vertigo of Pocket is made all the more daunting by the ribbed herringbone pattern that runs up and down the length of the canvas, its current only broken by the eloquent articulation of the lips of a pocket, whose contents mysteriously vanishes rendering the rest of the picture plane unscathed. Here, the incongruous feelings of distance evoked by Gnoli's enlarged detail stems from his deliberate attempt to express the abstract and the sublime through figurative means. In this way, Gnoli reinvented the figurative tradition during painting at a time when non-representational aesthetics dominated European art. Here, Gnoli asserts his membership to the typically Italian traditions that were celebrated for their capability of harmonizing objectivity and metaphysics, weaving his own aesthetic from the fifteenth century Quattrocento, so loved by his art historian father, and the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico. Profoundly influenced by the Surrealist forerunner, Gnoli relied upon a simple alchemy in order to transform the everyday into something ineffably strange, resulting in an atmosphere of revelatory timelessness. However, where de Chirico often created jarring juxtapositions to evoke a peculiar and potent atmosphere in his paintings, it is precisely in the isolation of figurative details that Gnoli's paintings derive their strength.
While Pocket not only reinvigorates pictorial traditions by reintroducing the figure in art, it also alludes to Gnoli's earliest sources of inspiration. The complexity of Albrecht Dürer's etchings and the unique stillness of Piero della Francesca's paintings were amongst the first touchstones for the young artist. Influenced by these early masters' crisp details, suspended animation, and certain articulations of light, the peculiar realism of Gnoli's magnified works summoned the Renaissance into the modern era. Following these principles, the detached introspection of Gnoli's meticulous naturalism successfully manipulates the observed world into an unprecedented new form, instilling the mundane with an unexpected sense of mystery that suggests an imagined or dream-like reality. The pictorial grammar of Pocket herefore hovers somewhere between truth and fiction, converting the micro into the macro and the mundane into the exceptional to prompt a reevaluation of our understanding of the world through its uncannily familiar form.
Revitalizing the atmosphere of mystery that was so central to the Quattrocento and the Pittura Metafisica, through his celebration of the modern world--inviting the viewer to appreciate the textures and appearances of the bourgeois consumer fashions of his time--Gnoli's work veered towards more contemporary developments in art. While he eschewed the aesthetic and thinking that underpinned the work of his Pop contemporaries across the Atlantic, who celebrated consumer society and media imagery in their pictures, Gnoli nonetheless appears to have used the abstraction that occurs when one focuses on a detail and blows it up to a new, impossible scale in order to point a dig at such movements as Op Art. However, embarking from Italian tradition, Gnoli's incredibly emphatic figuration was in stark contrast to the abstraction and Art Informel favored by so many of his contemporaries and close predecessors. Yet, it is in this sense that the fabric, with its exquisitely rendered, hyper-realistic pocket can even be seen as a riposte to Alberto Burri's Sacchi (fig. 2), Lucio Fontana's Tagli (fig. 3), or even the elegant drapery Piero Manzoni's Achromes.
In this way, despite its inscrutable, impenetrable appearance, Pocket functions on many levels. Borrowing the realism and mystery of the past, Gnoli--with his own immense sense of poetry--takes advantage of the Post-War Pop power of his enlarged fashions in order to mock his own contemporary world. And at the same time his works are only mere epiphanies, deprived of any context, allowed to fill a five-foot-tall canvas only to result in a splendid image that is both familiar and deeply uncanny. As Gnoli himself wrote in 1966, "The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the disturbing testimony of our solitude now that we are without recourse to ideologies and certainties" (quoted in S. Pezzato and D. Soutif, eds., Domenico Gnoli, exh. cat., Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, 2004, p. 217).
(fig. 1) Giorgio de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914. Private collection.
(fig. 2) Alberto Burri, Saco 8, 1953. Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione.
(fig. 3) Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1963-1964.
(fig. 4) René Magritte, Le fils de l'homme (The Son of Man). 1964. Private collection.
Set within the grand scale of its canvas, the immense vertigo of Pocket is made all the more daunting by the ribbed herringbone pattern that runs up and down the length of the canvas, its current only broken by the eloquent articulation of the lips of a pocket, whose contents mysteriously vanishes rendering the rest of the picture plane unscathed. Here, the incongruous feelings of distance evoked by Gnoli's enlarged detail stems from his deliberate attempt to express the abstract and the sublime through figurative means. In this way, Gnoli reinvented the figurative tradition during painting at a time when non-representational aesthetics dominated European art. Here, Gnoli asserts his membership to the typically Italian traditions that were celebrated for their capability of harmonizing objectivity and metaphysics, weaving his own aesthetic from the fifteenth century Quattrocento, so loved by his art historian father, and the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico. Profoundly influenced by the Surrealist forerunner, Gnoli relied upon a simple alchemy in order to transform the everyday into something ineffably strange, resulting in an atmosphere of revelatory timelessness. However, where de Chirico often created jarring juxtapositions to evoke a peculiar and potent atmosphere in his paintings, it is precisely in the isolation of figurative details that Gnoli's paintings derive their strength.
While Pocket not only reinvigorates pictorial traditions by reintroducing the figure in art, it also alludes to Gnoli's earliest sources of inspiration. The complexity of Albrecht Dürer's etchings and the unique stillness of Piero della Francesca's paintings were amongst the first touchstones for the young artist. Influenced by these early masters' crisp details, suspended animation, and certain articulations of light, the peculiar realism of Gnoli's magnified works summoned the Renaissance into the modern era. Following these principles, the detached introspection of Gnoli's meticulous naturalism successfully manipulates the observed world into an unprecedented new form, instilling the mundane with an unexpected sense of mystery that suggests an imagined or dream-like reality. The pictorial grammar of Pocket herefore hovers somewhere between truth and fiction, converting the micro into the macro and the mundane into the exceptional to prompt a reevaluation of our understanding of the world through its uncannily familiar form.
Revitalizing the atmosphere of mystery that was so central to the Quattrocento and the Pittura Metafisica, through his celebration of the modern world--inviting the viewer to appreciate the textures and appearances of the bourgeois consumer fashions of his time--Gnoli's work veered towards more contemporary developments in art. While he eschewed the aesthetic and thinking that underpinned the work of his Pop contemporaries across the Atlantic, who celebrated consumer society and media imagery in their pictures, Gnoli nonetheless appears to have used the abstraction that occurs when one focuses on a detail and blows it up to a new, impossible scale in order to point a dig at such movements as Op Art. However, embarking from Italian tradition, Gnoli's incredibly emphatic figuration was in stark contrast to the abstraction and Art Informel favored by so many of his contemporaries and close predecessors. Yet, it is in this sense that the fabric, with its exquisitely rendered, hyper-realistic pocket can even be seen as a riposte to Alberto Burri's Sacchi (fig. 2), Lucio Fontana's Tagli (fig. 3), or even the elegant drapery Piero Manzoni's Achromes.
In this way, despite its inscrutable, impenetrable appearance, Pocket functions on many levels. Borrowing the realism and mystery of the past, Gnoli--with his own immense sense of poetry--takes advantage of the Post-War Pop power of his enlarged fashions in order to mock his own contemporary world. And at the same time his works are only mere epiphanies, deprived of any context, allowed to fill a five-foot-tall canvas only to result in a splendid image that is both familiar and deeply uncanny. As Gnoli himself wrote in 1966, "The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the disturbing testimony of our solitude now that we are without recourse to ideologies and certainties" (quoted in S. Pezzato and D. Soutif, eds., Domenico Gnoli, exh. cat., Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, 2004, p. 217).
(fig. 1) Giorgio de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914. Private collection.
(fig. 2) Alberto Burri, Saco 8, 1953. Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione.
(fig. 3) Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1963-1964.
(fig. 4) René Magritte, Le fils de l'homme (The Son of Man). 1964. Private collection.