Domenico Gnoli was never tempted by the reality of the objects. Instead he believed in the representation of them, in their theatrical aspect. All of his works are like characters on stage; he was after all a brilliant stage designer. At theatre’s details escape the viewer, that’s when Gnoli’s art turns the lens and what we were used to seeing from afar becomes closer and closer. The proscenium is turned into a magnifying lens. The viewer is turned into a tailor, a hairstylist, a barber, a seamstress, a maid, also a flee. Everything in Gnoli’s art is perfectly in order, groomed, combed, pressed, clean. Gnoli’s paintings are not frozen, they are suspended, waiting for something to go wrong. The hand ruffling the hair, the sweat wrinkling the shirt, the spot staining the pants, the thread fraying, the button falling, the sex messing the bed.

In the mid-seventies Philip Guston will address some of Gnoli’s subjects, two people in bed, the back of a canvas, the shoe, in a much more seedy and sloppy way. While in the mid-eighties, in a much more eerie way, Robert Gober will address with his beds, sheets, legs and hair the hidden violence under a seemingly proper appearance. Gnoli does not load his work with such meanings. He is an esthetic. A pressed shirt is an act of love and a demonstration of care not the premise for any kind of violence. A well prepared bed an act of duty and devotion. The inside of a woman’s shoe a whole universe, an abstract space, a form.

In this painting we can find the same abstraction that we see in Pino Pascali’s fragments of animals. In fact Pascali and Gnoli were close friends sharing both the experimental attitude towards the world of images. Extracting details and giving them a life of their own. Inside of Lady’s Shoe, 1969 is maybe one of the more daring of Gnoli’s works. The viewer has to struggle to find his or her position and point view in relation to the painting. Once you find it then the space is magically revealed. It is like looking inside a Donald Judd sculpture where the space becomes form. In this case it is the form that Gnoli is masterfully able to transform into space, into void. This is one of the rare cases where Gnoli is escapes his often limiting, almost cartoonish style to achieve the revealing talent of a conceptual painter.