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Lot Essay
Painted in 1969, Shoulder dates from the late high period of Domenico Gnoli's career, and its importance is reflected in its impressive exhibition history, both in its early and more recent days. In his paintings, Gnoli applied a magnifying glass to the simplest building blocks of everyday life. The intense zoom and the cropping of his compositions meant that he presented the world around us in a new way. He shifted our perspective, allowing a re-evaluation of our understandings of the universe. In short, paintings such as Shoulder focus so intensely on the ordinary that it is reborn in our eyes and minds as something extraordinary. Gnoli stated that, 'My themes come from actuality, familiar situations' (quoted in exh. cat., Domenico Gnoli: Ultimas Obras 1963-1969, Madrid, 1990, p. 28). Certainly in his paintings it is not through strangeness that he jars our appreciation of the world around us, but instead through the familiar, which in his paintings is forced to take on uncanny new forms that, while remaining within the realm of our ken, nonetheless force new and unexpected properties to the fore.
In this way, the process by which Shoulder unveils a new understanding of the world resembles that of Surrealism, and more tellingly, its precursor, the Metafisica painting of Giorgio de Chirico. Unlike Surrealism, but like de Chirico, Gnoli relies upon a simple alchemy in order to transform the everyday into something ineffably strange. There are no extraneous or alien elements in this painting. However, where de Chirico often used jarring juxtapositions to evoke the strange and potent atmosphere of his paintings, it is precisely in the isolation of details of the world that Gnoli's paintings derive their strength. In Shoulder, the viewer sees a detail of a man in profile. But all the useful information that would normally make such a painting function has been removed: there is no face in profile, no information as to the identity of this statuesque model. Alternatively, we are left with the husk of a businessman. Instead of being a celebratory portrait of a powerful man, this is a faceless and anonymous glimpse that could belong to almost anyone.
Gnoli's ability to make the world around us appear vivid, hallucinatory and strange is entertaining and refreshing, yet at the same time the anonymous Shoulder hints at a deeper, darker message. The ability to present the conformity of the world in such a way, and to remove the telltales of personality, hint at a preoccupation with the fragility of identity. This is to some extent confirmed in Gnoli's own assertion that, 'The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the most disquieting testimony to our solitude, without further recourse to ideologies and certitudes' (Domenico Gnoli, quoted in E. Braun (ed.), Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988, Munich and London, 1989, p. 435). The imposing, faceless, impersonal wall of material presented in Shoulder deftly expresses this anxious solitude while paradoxically imparting the artist's infectious sense of whimsy. In this way, more than most other artists, Gnoli manages to confront contemporary concepts of the Absurd, with both the angst and the wit that the treatment of such a concept merits. This is an existential painting, the visual heir to the literary legacy of Albert Camus as much as to de Chirico. The faceless, drab shoulder of the businessman could easily be considered a new incarnation of Sisyphe. At the same time, there are hints of the jocular and fantastical absurdity of Italo Calvino's writings in this empty shell of a besuited figure, the ghost of his nonexistent knight brought into the modern visual language of the workplace.
As well as touching upon the literary worlds of Camus and Calvino, the combination of Shoulder's disjointedness with its monumental scale evokes the famous colossal fragmentary statue of Constantine discovered and still displayed in his native Rome. In the same way that the huge head, hand and foot of Constantine appear disjointed on each of their own pedestals, so too Shoulder allows the viewer to contemplate in isolation a fragment of a statuesque man. With all the other details removed, we focus on this expanse of suit and man, learning about it in a new way.
Through the sheer size of Shoulder, and the fact that so much of the picture's surface is dominated by the pinstripes of the suit, this realist and figurative painting appears almost to fade into abstraction. While on the one hand a new understanding of the world is introduced through this magnification, at the same time the shoulder becomes meaningless when presented in this manner, dissolving into a series of lines. There is a quasi-Op Art feel to the surface, which is almost mathematical for the large part with its rigid white lines on their grey background. The pinstripes echo Manzoni's pleated Achromes as much as anything else. While this allows Gnoli to tap further into the realm of the absurd, it also gives him a chance to cock a snook at the visual idiom of the abstract artists so prevalent during the 1960s. Gnoli was highjacking the superficial appearance of the work of Op Artists and Abstract Expressionists, yet puncturing their refusal to portray the exterior, visual world by prying their style into a figurative format. In this way, despite its inscrutable, impenetrable appearance, the suited Shoulder functions on many levels, taking advantage of its understated Pop poster power to mock the contemporary world, to instil joy in the viewer, and also to invoke a deeply philosophical existential angst.
In this way, the process by which Shoulder unveils a new understanding of the world resembles that of Surrealism, and more tellingly, its precursor, the Metafisica painting of Giorgio de Chirico. Unlike Surrealism, but like de Chirico, Gnoli relies upon a simple alchemy in order to transform the everyday into something ineffably strange. There are no extraneous or alien elements in this painting. However, where de Chirico often used jarring juxtapositions to evoke the strange and potent atmosphere of his paintings, it is precisely in the isolation of details of the world that Gnoli's paintings derive their strength. In Shoulder, the viewer sees a detail of a man in profile. But all the useful information that would normally make such a painting function has been removed: there is no face in profile, no information as to the identity of this statuesque model. Alternatively, we are left with the husk of a businessman. Instead of being a celebratory portrait of a powerful man, this is a faceless and anonymous glimpse that could belong to almost anyone.
Gnoli's ability to make the world around us appear vivid, hallucinatory and strange is entertaining and refreshing, yet at the same time the anonymous Shoulder hints at a deeper, darker message. The ability to present the conformity of the world in such a way, and to remove the telltales of personality, hint at a preoccupation with the fragility of identity. This is to some extent confirmed in Gnoli's own assertion that, 'The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the most disquieting testimony to our solitude, without further recourse to ideologies and certitudes' (Domenico Gnoli, quoted in E. Braun (ed.), Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988, Munich and London, 1989, p. 435). The imposing, faceless, impersonal wall of material presented in Shoulder deftly expresses this anxious solitude while paradoxically imparting the artist's infectious sense of whimsy. In this way, more than most other artists, Gnoli manages to confront contemporary concepts of the Absurd, with both the angst and the wit that the treatment of such a concept merits. This is an existential painting, the visual heir to the literary legacy of Albert Camus as much as to de Chirico. The faceless, drab shoulder of the businessman could easily be considered a new incarnation of Sisyphe. At the same time, there are hints of the jocular and fantastical absurdity of Italo Calvino's writings in this empty shell of a besuited figure, the ghost of his nonexistent knight brought into the modern visual language of the workplace.
As well as touching upon the literary worlds of Camus and Calvino, the combination of Shoulder's disjointedness with its monumental scale evokes the famous colossal fragmentary statue of Constantine discovered and still displayed in his native Rome. In the same way that the huge head, hand and foot of Constantine appear disjointed on each of their own pedestals, so too Shoulder allows the viewer to contemplate in isolation a fragment of a statuesque man. With all the other details removed, we focus on this expanse of suit and man, learning about it in a new way.
Through the sheer size of Shoulder, and the fact that so much of the picture's surface is dominated by the pinstripes of the suit, this realist and figurative painting appears almost to fade into abstraction. While on the one hand a new understanding of the world is introduced through this magnification, at the same time the shoulder becomes meaningless when presented in this manner, dissolving into a series of lines. There is a quasi-Op Art feel to the surface, which is almost mathematical for the large part with its rigid white lines on their grey background. The pinstripes echo Manzoni's pleated Achromes as much as anything else. While this allows Gnoli to tap further into the realm of the absurd, it also gives him a chance to cock a snook at the visual idiom of the abstract artists so prevalent during the 1960s. Gnoli was highjacking the superficial appearance of the work of Op Artists and Abstract Expressionists, yet puncturing their refusal to portray the exterior, visual world by prying their style into a figurative format. In this way, despite its inscrutable, impenetrable appearance, the suited Shoulder functions on many levels, taking advantage of its understated Pop poster power to mock the contemporary world, to instil joy in the viewer, and also to invoke a deeply philosophical existential angst.