Sous la Chaussure (Under the Shoe)

An exquisitely executed painting of a black wingtip shoe lifting from the ground, Sous la Chaussure (Under the Shoe) (1967) is a masterclass in Domenico Gnoli’s thrilling, microscopically observed surrealism. Blown up to monumental scale, Gnoli’s carefully framed details of tailoring, furniture and hairstyles become hypnotic, dreamlike fields of texture and pattern. His vision is at once intimate and remote, obsessive and detached, hallucinatory and richly real. Viewed from behind, the shoe’s rising heel and sole fill most of the present canvas; its form, dramatically foreshortened, becomes a vast, voluptuous black silhouette. Every detail—the shoe’s punched broguing and gleaming stacked heel, the fine weave of a red sock, the shadow cast on the ridged, bamboo-coloured floor—is picked out with hyper-real attention. Gnoli has blended his paint with sand, creating a tactile surface that heightens the work’s sensory charge. Widely exhibited since its creation, including in a major 1990 survey of Gnoli’s late works at the Fundación Caja de Pensiones, Madrid, Sous la Chaussure has been in the same private collection for more than thirty-five years. The work has been requested for inclusion in the upcoming Domenico Gnoli retrospective at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, from October 2021 to February 2022.

Shoes were an important theme for Gnoli, appearing multiple times in his large-scale works: a heeled shoe viewed in profile (Scarpa vista di profilo, 1966, Ludwig Museum, Cologne); stilettos, neatly paired and seen from behind (Lady’s Feet, 1969, Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal); and, in the penultimate painting of the artist’s life, the sharp, shining toe of a black leather pump (Pointed Shoe, 1969). If the present work’s shoe is more masculine in character, it nonetheless resonates with ideas of fetishism, fascination and the subconscious that are central to Freudian psychoanalysis—an approach to the mind in which Gnoli expressed close interest. In the late 1950s he regularly visited St. Luke’s Hospital in London as a volunteer therapist, helping patients to express their obsessions and traumas through drawing. He was familiar with the work of the Surrealists, who had championed similar methods half a century earlier in order to unleash the unconscious into their art. Inevitably, shoes played a key role for them too: André Breton’s unconscious was unlocked by a ‘dream object’ that hybridised a spoon and a slipper, while the central component of Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically (1931) was a lady’s red heel.

Born in Rome to an art historian father, Gnoli considered himself rooted in a rich artistic heritage. ‘At a time like this,’ he explained in 1966, ‘when iconoclastic anti-painting wants to sever all connections with the past, I want to join my work to that “non-elegant” tradition born in Italy in the Quattrocento and recently filtered through the Metaphysical school’ (D. Gnoli, 1966, quoted in E. Braun (ed.), Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988, London 1989, p. 435). Gnoli’s work can be seen in relation to contemporary Pop works by artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, whose oversized depictions of consumer objects—informed by the sensational language of advertising—turned them into estranged, alienating icons. In his fixation on polished leather, fine textiles and neatly parted hair, however, Gnoli betrays an interest in a quieter, older and more artisanal world. Distinct from the pristine flatness of Pop, the present work’s sandy pigment foregrounds the sense of touch as well as vision; its floor-up perspective might be seen to stir the deep memories of earliest childhood, and even a primordial image of paternal authority. Inflected by examples from the Renaissance and beyond, the marvellous spectacle of Sous la Chaussure reflects Gnoli’s deeply personal attitude towards the things of modern life, and is expressive of feeling and fact in equal measure.