Domenico Gnoli’s Dizzying Closeups of the Everyday

The seventeen paintings in “The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli,” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, will induce a kind of perceptual whiplash. They seem static on first approach—enlarged trousers, neckties, torsos, and furniture—but the scale of things is in constant flux. One moment, you’re looking at an enormous shirt collar, and feel like a mosquito approaching it; the next, you’re a child standing at the foot of a bed, or a tiny ghost hovering over it. The paintings lavish a warmth of attention on everyday objects but feel emotionally chilled, almost frigid. At times they seem simpleminded and empty, at others complicated and full. They have the air of a benevolent scam.

Gnoli isn’t well known in the U.S., but I’d guess that’s going to change. His paintings are crowd-pleasers that double as art-historical riddles. Play the taxonomy game with his work—Pop? Op? Surrealism? Photorealism?—and it splinters in curious ways. One could think of him as René Magritte with a magnifying glass, and without the philosophical jokes, but that’s not exactly fair. Gnoli was born in Rome, in 1933. First, he had the patrimony of the Renaissance to deal with. (His father was an art historian.) Then he had to look down the barrel of twentieth-century Italy, home to perhaps the most contradictory avant-garde in Europe. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the techno-fascist founder of Futurism, ran around with a bloodthirsty smile, shrieking about how much he loved Mussolini and automobiles. Giorgio de Chirico peddled his metaphysical pictures as a cure to modernism. By the sixties, when Gnoli was in his prime, Piero Manzoni was stuffing his own shit into cans (“Artist’s Shit”) and blowing his breath into balloons (“Artist’s Breath”), and Arte Povera was inviting horses into galleries. Gnoli looked around and decided he would do something a little more visually appealing.

When Gnoli was a child, his mother, a ceramicist, encouraged his early talent for drawing, while his father educated him about architecture and urged him to become a painter. At eighteen, Gnoli was designing sets for theatrical productions and had his first solo show in Rome. He worked mostly with ink at this point, his style a baroque variation on Surrealism: a loose, expressive line put in service of fantastical architecture with twisting stairs, wobbly loggias, and buttresses to nowhere. (Dalí, who visited Rome in 1948, to design sets for a Shakespeare production, was a clear influence.) Eventually, Gnoli chafed at the communal atmosphere of theatre and began to illustrate magazines and books, though he still kept a toe in the art world.