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Born in Rome in 1933 to an art critic father and a painter and ceramist mother, Domenico Gnoli began his artistic career as an actor with the Pilotto-Carraro Miserocchi company, before turning to theatrical set and costume design.
The drawings he produced for the theater between 1951 and 1955 already testify to the ease and technical virtuosity of his line, applied to the details of costumes and sets. Like the sets he created for the stage, Domenico Gnoli also produced works on canvas that take up the elements of an architecture treated as a still life. The sometimes slightly distorted views of cities and buildings, painted with a mixture of oil and sand, are reminiscent of Hundertwasser's contemporary compositions.
Around 1964, Domenico Gnoli achieved the style and repertoire for which he is now renowned. A harbinger of the hyperrealism and photographic realism of the 1970s, Gnoli's works are a blend of Vermeerian perfection and American pop art. Hair curls, shirt collars, trouser pockets, beds, sofas whose fabric has retained the imprint of the body that has deserted them: in each of these compositions, often in large format, the realism is as disturbing as the subject seems banal. However, the clear, precise lines of Gnoli's work are not intended to serve as an exact representation of reality: these magnified fragments bear no wear or dust. The objects, intact and flawless, seem outside reality, in a space where time and Man no longer hold sway. Domenico Gnoli's works from this period evoke an almost eerie sense of calm and silence. Anonymous objects take on an autonomy and motionless perfection, pure forms stripped of context and circumstance.
"All the things Gnoli shows us have something to do with man, they are made for him - but left to their own devices, they show only the absence of man".
Wieland Schmeid, in preface to the exhibition at the Kestner Gesellchaft, Hanover, 1968
In 1969, the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York organized the artist's first solo show in the United States, where he was very well received by collectors. "Unbuttoned Button", painted on this occasion, was one of a few dozen works in this series that would make the artist internationally popular. Domenico Gnoli died prematurely at the age of 36 in 1970, just a few months after this critical success, leaving a rare and sought-after body of work, as much for its technical virtuosity as for its unique view of man's place in twentieth-century society. Today, Gnoli's compositions can be found in the world's leading museums.
