His early experiences revealed Gnoli to be an eclectic artist, and the ideal illustrator for the calculated innocence of The Baron in the Trees (1957). These early achievements would eventually lead Gnoli to be celebrated for the technique and articulation in his illustrative works. In a sweeping new survey featuring over 100 paintings, Fondazione Prada reveals an important selection of drawings, sketches, documents and early works that chart the evolution of this singular talent.
With the opportunity to experience Gnoli’s drawings up close, the show reveals works that are rich in detail without capturing the entire essence of their subject, a trope that manifested in a slow arc through the artist’s short yet prolific career. In fact, it transformed Gnoli the ‘illustrator’ into Gnoli the philosopher. It is no longer the anecdote that he describes, but the close-up details which never appear in the whole. It is a portion of trousers that could belong to a mannequin or a gentleman; it is the rigid geometry of an ironed crease on a tablecloth that we could imagine as an endless topography; it is a dress collar and a piece of hair whose geometric structures appear analogous. The essence of these things seem to lie in their isolation: a hem of the collar of a shirt is something more than the shirt itself. Here, Gnoli arrives at the crux of the image that made him famous, a notoriety that came posthumously but exalted the artist as a cult figure, and his canvases as iconic images.
The focus on detail emphasises the objective quality of the subject at hand. The tunnel vision highlights the otherness that lies in identity: our skin seen through this lens is a geographical map of roughness unpredictable to the naked eye. For Gnoli, to isolate a particularity is to identify the constitutive essence of the whole, without any misunderstanding.