CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/20/2022

The ultimate 'Domenico Gnoli'

"Cravate" (1967) is reproduced from Domenico Gnoli, the highly anticipated new release from Fondazione Prada. Published to accompany the exhibition on view at Fondazione Prada through the end of this month, this gorgeous, 424-page, Irma Boom-designed paperback is the definitive survey of the Italian painter's unique amalgam of Pop and Surrealism. "In these paintings of lucid, vigorous 'ineloquence,' Domenico Gnoli intensifies and condenses the presence of the objects, and thereby amplifies the absence of the contexts from which he had arbitrarily lifted them," Salvatore Settis writes. "He lends a hypnotic aura, an operative agency to the minuscule segments of the world that he flaunts and dilates. He offers clues, opens glimpses of reality, invites us to understand their complexity, transforms the detail that he himself chose into a random 'archeological' fragment of a world (perhaps dreamlike, perhaps hyperreal) beyond the threshold of our gaze, but not of his. As in art history books, but also in comic strips, his details refer to something else, and not only in keeping with the rhetorical figure of synecdoche, but because shirt collars, shoes, parted hair, armchairs, wristwatches have inventory and probative value. They summon us to 'rêverie and meditation,' they tell us everything we need to know to intuit stories not recounted but condensed into icons…"