Detail

“The trivial object itself, enlarged through the attention paid to it, is more important, beautiful and terrible than any fantasy could make it. It tells me more about myself than anything else, filling me with dread, disgust and delight.” This is how Italian artist Domenico Gnoli describes his fascination with the things surrounding us in our everyday lives, things that are accorded the role of protagonists in his pictures. Gnoli isolates these objects from their normal context, then painstakingly blows up details and finally paints these onto large-size canvasses. This method has the effect of rendering familiar objects – a tie, a wrist watch, a buttonhole – scary and overpowering, strange and magical at one and the same time. Gnoli moved to New York in the late 1950s. His obsession with trivial objects betrays a certain affinity to Pop Art, which at that time was on the rise in America. Though he died at the early age of 37, Gnoli left a substantial and significant body of work that secures him a permanent place in the history of art as an important proponent of Magical Realism and the legitimate descendant of Italian Pittura Metafisica.