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Lot Essay
‘My themes come from the world around me, familiar situations, everyday life; because I never actively mediate against the object, I experience the magic of its presence’ (Domenico Gnoli)
Domenico Gnoli celebrates the details and textures of everyday life in Bouton n. 2 (Button n. 2), an exquisite exemplar of the artist’s surrealist, metaphysical practice. The work’s titular motif hovers above the midpoint of the canvas, affixed to a finely pinstriped grey fabric. The button casts a delicate crescent-shaped shadow, aligning the intimacy of the artist’s gaze with the vastness of the natural world. Gnoli mixed sand with acrylic to form a dense, tactile substance, so that the surface of the canvas is animated by texture. The effect is sculptural and substantial, and at the same time elusive, as though the image might at any moment come apart. Executed in 1967, the work was originally a gift from Gnoli to the artist Fabio Mauri and photographer Elisabetta Catalano. It was exhibited at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome as part of the X Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in 1972-1973, and has been unseen in public since.
In February 1967, an exhibition of Gnoli’s paintings opened at the Galleria Odyssia in Rome. In honour of the exhibition Mauri and Catalano hosted a party for the artist, which Gnoli’s wife Yannick later recalled as a ‘grand gathering’, attended by notable names of the day such as the French painter Balthus and Italian film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. In thanks, Gnoli gifted the couple Bouton n. 2, and later that summer they accompanied Gnoli and Yannick on a sailing holiday. Gnoli was largely supporting himself through illustration commissions at the time, and had recently purchased The Ataman, a Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter sailboat, with proceeds from the publication of his drawings in Life magazine.
That summer, Gnoli, Yannick, Mauri and Catalano, and another couple from their sociable Rome milieu—the radical American heiress Elaine Broadhead and her husband William—sailed in The Ataman from Mallorca to the island of Cabrera. In a note thanking Gnoli and Yannick for their hospitality, Mauri wrote that both he and Catalano had found the trip a source of immense creative inspiration. ‘I’ve gotten back to work, based on notes I’d hastily jotted down in Cabrera,’ he writes. ‘I “see” some images, like the hunt, certain fires, the relationship with the fish, the strange pleasure that arises from waiting for them, catching them’ (F. Mauri, letter to D. Gnoli, dated 11 September 1967).
Gnoli, whose father Umberto was an art historian, saw his work in the tradition of Mannerist and early Renaissance masters such as Piero della Francesca. ‘In a moment like this of iconoclastic anti-painting,’ he stated, ‘which would like to break all bridges with the past, I want to establish my work in the “not eloquent” tradition that arose in Italy during the 15th century, and which has finally come down to us through the metaphysical school’ (D. Gnoli quoted in C. Barbatti and G. Lotti, ‘A Life in Pictures and Documents: 1933-1970’, in Domenico Gnoli, exh. cat. Fondazione Prada, Milan 2021, pp. 233-234). In the grainy surface of the present canvas Gnoli conjures a patina rich with history, memory and feeling. Imbuing Bouton n. 2 with a talismanic quality, Gnoli elevates the painting’s subject to the status of secular icon.
Domenico Gnoli celebrates the details and textures of everyday life in Bouton n. 2 (Button n. 2), an exquisite exemplar of the artist’s surrealist, metaphysical practice. The work’s titular motif hovers above the midpoint of the canvas, affixed to a finely pinstriped grey fabric. The button casts a delicate crescent-shaped shadow, aligning the intimacy of the artist’s gaze with the vastness of the natural world. Gnoli mixed sand with acrylic to form a dense, tactile substance, so that the surface of the canvas is animated by texture. The effect is sculptural and substantial, and at the same time elusive, as though the image might at any moment come apart. Executed in 1967, the work was originally a gift from Gnoli to the artist Fabio Mauri and photographer Elisabetta Catalano. It was exhibited at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome as part of the X Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in 1972-1973, and has been unseen in public since.
In February 1967, an exhibition of Gnoli’s paintings opened at the Galleria Odyssia in Rome. In honour of the exhibition Mauri and Catalano hosted a party for the artist, which Gnoli’s wife Yannick later recalled as a ‘grand gathering’, attended by notable names of the day such as the French painter Balthus and Italian film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. In thanks, Gnoli gifted the couple Bouton n. 2, and later that summer they accompanied Gnoli and Yannick on a sailing holiday. Gnoli was largely supporting himself through illustration commissions at the time, and had recently purchased The Ataman, a Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter sailboat, with proceeds from the publication of his drawings in Life magazine.
That summer, Gnoli, Yannick, Mauri and Catalano, and another couple from their sociable Rome milieu—the radical American heiress Elaine Broadhead and her husband William—sailed in The Ataman from Mallorca to the island of Cabrera. In a note thanking Gnoli and Yannick for their hospitality, Mauri wrote that both he and Catalano had found the trip a source of immense creative inspiration. ‘I’ve gotten back to work, based on notes I’d hastily jotted down in Cabrera,’ he writes. ‘I “see” some images, like the hunt, certain fires, the relationship with the fish, the strange pleasure that arises from waiting for them, catching them’ (F. Mauri, letter to D. Gnoli, dated 11 September 1967).
Gnoli, whose father Umberto was an art historian, saw his work in the tradition of Mannerist and early Renaissance masters such as Piero della Francesca. ‘In a moment like this of iconoclastic anti-painting,’ he stated, ‘which would like to break all bridges with the past, I want to establish my work in the “not eloquent” tradition that arose in Italy during the 15th century, and which has finally come down to us through the metaphysical school’ (D. Gnoli quoted in C. Barbatti and G. Lotti, ‘A Life in Pictures and Documents: 1933-1970’, in Domenico Gnoli, exh. cat. Fondazione Prada, Milan 2021, pp. 233-234). In the grainy surface of the present canvas Gnoli conjures a patina rich with history, memory and feeling. Imbuing Bouton n. 2 with a talismanic quality, Gnoli elevates the painting’s subject to the status of secular icon.