Approaching Domenico Gnoli’s art, a genius Italian master born in Rome (1933) and deceased in New York (1970) at the age of 37, is like entering a wonderful world.

Gnoli is an outlier in international contemporary art: he was neither a realist, nor a surrealist; neither pop, nor conceptual, he was a skilful rider in all these areas, in magnificent paintings made in a short period.

Following the exhibition project of the curator Germano Celant, before he died in 2020, Fondazione Prada in Milan proposes – until the end of February – a large show dedicated to the painter, with more than three hundred works, including paintings, drawings, books and incisions.

The necessary premise – according to those who write – is to use literary tricks more than critical words, when we enter the Podium of the Foundation and visit Domenico Gnoli.

The work Species of Spaces – by French writer Georges Perec -, besides being a delicious “magic” study on the most different places inhabited and used by human beings, is the work most like the subjects painted in Gnoli’s brief career: the details.

What shadows the details have! And so much beauty! And more: how they are experts at hiding from our gaze! The artist is the one who finds them out and forces us – through his canvases – to consider a new reality.

The public is astonished before towelled tables; knotted ties; buttons; a sleeve of a suit whose end shows a precisely defined watch; armchairs and upholstery; “visible” brick walls, men’s and women’s hairstyles, shoes. All with bold, accidental and overwhelming perspectives.

Standing before the paintings, the public never imagined it was possible to find out so many things, looking at a garment differently, the detail of a coat, shoes magnified, observed from behind.

Just as Renée Magritte shows us an alien world, where men rain from the sky with open umbrellas, and in another famous painting we see the sunset through a windowpane, Gnoli appears to follow his colleague with rapture, looking for him in the overlooked everyday life, in the elements that constantly appear before our eyes but go unnoticed. A visual and poetic strategy that Gnoli used with “photographic cuts”, that is, framing the subject through odd points of view.

Gnoli’s artistic work was born as an evolution of his activity as a set designer. About painting, he says: “I just took my decorative world and put it into painting, with the excesses and the old style, taking away every bit of elegance, revealing what were – for me – the fields of poetry and drama. I gave painting the role of trompe-l’oeil”.

Curiously, while his work ceased to be “realistic” and entered fields that were more evocative than technical, his illustrations continued to be packed with atmospheres, objects and forms.

The “forced” and dry representation of details in the large paintings is mirrored – creating the idea of a transition between “positive” and “negative”, ying-yang – in the small papers outlined with Indian ink. There is a composition with wonderful scenes, reminiscent even of the old wunderkammer.

In Gnoli’s art, the low, the unnoticed, the small find a new dignity: “I have never wanted to deform my subjects, nor to add or take away anything from them: I isolate and represent. I do not intervene against the object; I can sense the magic of its presence”.

If you want to see it, it’s time.

Domenico Gnoli, at Fondazione Prada in Milan, until February 27, 2022.