Domenico Gnoli’s L’inverno (Couple au Lit), from 1967, must rank among the least intimate images of a very intimate act ever committed to canvas. In it, the Italian painter shows a man and a woman in missionary position, with a sheet pulled all the way up to their hairlines. Though it’s possible to get a glimpse of the man’s legs between his mate’s unnaturally long thighs, Gnoli paints the scene so that there’s more attention to the paisley bedspread, which appears to seal these people’s bodies in place. Like so many other works by Gnoli, this one is pallid and cold. In its own funky way, it’s also delicious.
To call Gnoli, who died at 36 in 1970, under-recognized feels wrong, given that he had a retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2021 and appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale. But he truly isn’t well-known in the US, which has seen few shows devoted to him. It’s a fact that’s surprising, considering how current his art feels right now. Back in 2018, when the figuration craze really got going, Andrew Russeth remarked in this magazine that younger painters are “attuned to humor (slapstick looms large), fixated on the body, rapacious in their mining of both art history and the broader culture (from TV to Internet memes), and most of all, determined to impart pleasure.” Nearly all of those qualifiers could apply to Gnoli.
The paintings in this exquisite show, one of the year’s best in New York so far, depict a range of off-kilter subjects: a woman’s wavy brown hair, the corner of a brick wall, a starchy chemise lain across a table. Most paintings here are claustrophobically composed, so that their subjects are pressed uncomfortably close to the viewer, and quite a few adopt a clinical palette of whites and greys. (Even when pink appears, Gnoli blunts the hue’s vibrancy.) These paintings are all jokey studies in emotional detachment, a sensibility made plain in Back View (1968), in which Gnoli paints the verso of a canvas. Called upon to present itself for admiration, the painting gives us its backside.
Through May 23, at 19 East 64th Street
