Ksenija Carleton Final Review of 'The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli' (Lévy Gorvy Dayan)

 

In early April of 2026, when walking past New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery, one could easily find themselves face to seed, with the inside of an apple. From March 18^th to May 23^rd, Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s stone façade was decorated with a banner, advertising the gallery’s retrospective on Italian artist Domenico Gnoli, that showcased the interior of a quartered apple. Evoking a yonic shape, the sexual suggestiveness of the cut apple is increased by two brown seeds, which are perched in the upper quarter of the fruit. Although the painting referenced in the show’s banner (in which the entirety of the apple is displayed) is far less erotic, it nonetheless prepares us for the contained intimacy that constitutes a throughline throughout Domenico Gnoli’s work.

Domenico Gnoli was born in Rome in 1933. His early career in illustration, then costume and set design, ostensibly inspired the great attention to detail, and interest in the physicality of objects that characterized his painting from 1964 onwards. The works displayed at Lévy Gorvy Dayan span from 1956 to 1969, with the first floor of the gallery showcasing Gnoli’s later paintings. The show opens with Striped Trousers (1969), which depicts the upper half of a pair of worn pin-striped pants, spanning from the pants’ top hem to a few inches above the knee. The pants are displayed against a dark gray background, and appear to be floating in indistinguishable space.

Striped Trousers is an introduction to Gnoli’s consistent interest in material and texture that characterizes the following works displayed on the first floor. Other paintings include similarly zoomed-in images of isolated objects, such as an armchair, an apple, a brick wall, and the back of a painting. In the central room of the second floor, the gallery displays the artist’s early illustrations, preparatory sketches, and photographs of him in the studio. The room in the gallery’s southern wing exhibits a group of paintings that all depict variations of a bed. Some are unmade, some inhabited, and others neat and seemingly untouched.

L’inverno (Couple au lit), 1967, encapsulates the artist’s play with intimacy and distance particularly well. The painting shows a couple, whose intertwined bodies are silhouetted under the blue paisley sheets of an off-white double bed. Peeking through the covers, only the tops of their heads are shown. The point of view is zoomed in to the point that the bed itself spills beyond the canvas – the limits of which crop the pillows at the top of the painting, and the couple’s feet, at the bottom. Yet the visual proximity with the couple creates no sense of intimacy with the viewer. Rather, by hiding the couple from our view and emphasizing what we cannot see, Gnoli establishes an uncanny sense of distance. The perspective also intimates the bed-spread with the flatness of a canvas, onto which Gnoli conducts a pictorial exploration of color, shapes, and shadows.

Indeed, through his masterful investigation of texture, Gnoli tempts the viewers with an intimate foray into the materials of everyday objects. He depicts the everyday at a closeness that would be impossible to replicate in the real world. Yet ultimately by getting so close, Gnoli oxymoronically paints the eerie alienation of material culture in the modern world.     

Ksenija Carleton