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Lot Essay
At a young age, Gnoli had shown a prodigious talent for scenography including success at an Old Vic production of Shakespeare's As You Like It in his early twenties. These experiences gave him a sense and experience of scale that would later come to dominate his artistic output. This sense of scale stood Gnoli in great stead when he exhibited in New York in 1969. The largeness and abruptness of paintings like Suitcase, which was painted for this landmark exhibition, smack of an American appreciation of scale. The exhibition in part exploited the affinities between Gnoli and the rising stars of Pop Art in the United States. This was a well-judged tactic, as the show was a great success, instrumental in consolidating Gnoli's international standing.
The open lid in Suitcase appears aggressive, reminiscent of a pair of gaping jaws. The case, blown out of all sensible proportions, conveys a sense of real depth through its simple perspectival lines. Gnoli has applied strict mathematics to art in order to depict the case according to strict scale and a quasi-photorealist accuracy, in order to turn representation in upon itself. The realism of the case, the 'truth' of its depiction here, is necessarily nullified and destroyed by the vastness of the canvas, and therefore of the case. This creates a strange play on reality and perception - while the case is too large to be believed, the viewer still feels in danger of being absorbed, entrapped in its confines. The perspectival field Gnoli has created projects itself into the viewer's environment, making the case loom larger than life into the world. At the same time, Gnoli's own use of perspective, the scientific application of geometry to the depiction of this object, implies such impossibility of scale that the painting itself becomes abstract, the Suitcase reduced to a collection of fields of tone and colour. This is emphasised by Gnoli's use of sand on the surface of his painting - he deliberately brings the viewer's attention to the materiality of the work itself as a two-dimensional object, not as a representation of a three-dimensional one. He thus paradoxically creates and destroys Suitcase's trompe l'oeil effect.
Gnoli's interest in surfaces extended to the objects depicted, for instance the suitcase's paisley lining. The scale of the case means that they appear like microbes under intense magnification, losing any sense of context. This interest in texture and the richness of the material helps Gnoli induce the existential nausea so central to his works: 'You begin looking at things, and they look just fine, as normal as ever; but then you look for a while longer and your feelings get involved and they begin changing things for you and they go on and on till you don't see the house any longer, you only see them, I mean your feelings, and that's why you see this mess' (D. Gnoli, Appunti per un testo incompleto, 1968, quoted in W. Guadagnini, Domenico Gnoli, Milan 2001, p.13).
The open lid in Suitcase appears aggressive, reminiscent of a pair of gaping jaws. The case, blown out of all sensible proportions, conveys a sense of real depth through its simple perspectival lines. Gnoli has applied strict mathematics to art in order to depict the case according to strict scale and a quasi-photorealist accuracy, in order to turn representation in upon itself. The realism of the case, the 'truth' of its depiction here, is necessarily nullified and destroyed by the vastness of the canvas, and therefore of the case. This creates a strange play on reality and perception - while the case is too large to be believed, the viewer still feels in danger of being absorbed, entrapped in its confines. The perspectival field Gnoli has created projects itself into the viewer's environment, making the case loom larger than life into the world. At the same time, Gnoli's own use of perspective, the scientific application of geometry to the depiction of this object, implies such impossibility of scale that the painting itself becomes abstract, the Suitcase reduced to a collection of fields of tone and colour. This is emphasised by Gnoli's use of sand on the surface of his painting - he deliberately brings the viewer's attention to the materiality of the work itself as a two-dimensional object, not as a representation of a three-dimensional one. He thus paradoxically creates and destroys Suitcase's trompe l'oeil effect.
Gnoli's interest in surfaces extended to the objects depicted, for instance the suitcase's paisley lining. The scale of the case means that they appear like microbes under intense magnification, losing any sense of context. This interest in texture and the richness of the material helps Gnoli induce the existential nausea so central to his works: 'You begin looking at things, and they look just fine, as normal as ever; but then you look for a while longer and your feelings get involved and they begin changing things for you and they go on and on till you don't see the house any longer, you only see them, I mean your feelings, and that's why you see this mess' (D. Gnoli, Appunti per un testo incompleto, 1968, quoted in W. Guadagnini, Domenico Gnoli, Milan 2001, p.13).