The child’s gaze

“I am metaphysical inasmuch as I am looking for a non-eloquent painting, immobile and of atmosphere, which feeds on static situations. I always use given and simple elements, I don’t want to add or subtract anything. I haven’t ever wanted to distort. I isolate and represent. My themes are derived from current events, from familiar situations, from daily life, because I never actively intervene against the object, I can feel the magic of its presence”.

Domenico Gnoli was born into an artistic family, which is why he recognised that he “was born knowing”, because from a very early age his life revolved around theatres, exhibitions, trips to museums and conversations about art. His grandfather was a romantic poet, his father was an art historian and his mother a painter and ceramicist. In a way, painting was something that was passed down to him.

But before painting, he was drawn to the theatre, and wanted to be an actor with the Compagnia Pilotto-Carraro Miserocchi. There, instead of acting, he worked successfully, designing the sets for plays such as Shakespeare’s As you like it, performed in London. He attained a certain renown, and at the height of his career as a set designer, at the age of 23, he travelled to New York for his first exhibition. Afterwards he began working as an illustrator of magazines such as Vogue or Sports Illustrated.

A trip to Mallorca in the early 1960s changed Gnoli’s life forever. He came to the island to visit his friend, the surrealist painter Mati Klarwein, in Deià, and it was here that he found “the place he had always been looking for as a base to work in beautiful surroundings and isolation”.

During his first summer in the village, which became an internationally-famous artistic centre, he painted around 30 works, some of which went on to form part of his first exhibition in Paris, in 1964.

After dividing his time between Rome, Paris and Mallorca for four years, he decided Deià should be his home all year round. He settled in s’Estaca, the property the Archduke Ludwig Salvator had built for his Mallorcan lover, Catalina Homar, now owned by the actor Michael Douglas.

“There, he devoted his life to painting and created the most wonderful works because he found the Absolute. I believe that when a person is close to dying, they unconsciously have a feeling of finitude, of urgency, and he had that given urgency to do more and more. It’s the place where he worked the most, and where he created the most beautiful paintings of his life”, says Yanick Vu, who was his wife at the time.

He painted some of his most famous pictures in the estate’s tiny oil press, where decades earlier olives were crushed to make oil. “When you are talented, you tend to create easy things, but that used to give him vertigo. He searched for an identity in his painting, and that is why there was a duality between the illustrator and the painter, who wanted to express something much more important. He died young, and produced few works, but in spite of that they are timeless, and defy all the ages”, Yannick remarks. These works are fragments of his life and that of his wife, and they speak of absence and presence, of plenitude and solitude.

Guy Tosatto, director of the Grenoble Museum and an art expert, defined Gnoli’s art “as though he were a child discovering the world. The things he apprehends seem strange, full of mystery. For a long time the child stares at them to discover their meaning, penetrate their silence, and he realizes that things are like a mirror…. The child could be Domenico Gnoli. From the time of his childhood, he would have preserved the memory of this discovery”.

For Gnoli, “imagination and invention cannot [...]

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