Whenever one looks at a Morandi one looks at it as if from the same place. So consistent is the scale and proportion of the painted objects in his still lifes, so familiar is their setting at a certain recession in the depicted space, that it can sometimes feel as though the painting has roped itself off. I like to think of this viewing position as something like the threshold of the doorway to the bedroom at no. 37 via Fondazza in Bologna, where the artist meticulously arranged, rearranged, and painted combinations of bottles, jugs, and vases for over forty years. 

An appreciation of the way Morandi’s paintings seduce the viewer into the dimensions of their world whilst also rooting her to the spot may be illuminated by comparison with another Italian artist, born forty-three years later, in 1933. The late works for which Domenico Gnoli is best known, painted between 1965 and 1970, often feature the artist’s favourite tropes: haberdashery, hairstyles, shoes, etc. The painted objects loom into the picture plane. Yet, like a Morandi it is by the consistently maintained peculiarities of illusionistic depth and scale as much as by the things themselves that these paintings are occupied. 

Before turning to painting, Gnoli had a successful career as a set designer and also worked in advertising, but in 1962 he left New York, where he had moved in his early twenties, and settled in the small village of Deià in Mallorca. Both Gnoli and Morandi came to develop a distinctive style based on a signature distance between what is perceived and where it is perceived from. In contrast to the ascetic Morandi, Gnoli’s proximity to his objects was prone to vacillations that are more suggestive of a restless curiosity than a honed discipline. One gets the sense that however much this distance works for Gnoli, however at home he is in this viewing position, he is still in the process of crossing its thresholds and exploring its corners. Perhaps time would have congealed the relation. Gnoli died at the age of 36 on a trip to New York to arrange an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970.

Gnoli’s tendency to focus in on fragments which cut out the noise of any extraneous visual material, means his compositions are often said to be indebted to photography. Perhaps they are, but there is an impulsiveness endemic to the particular mode of looking these paintings employ, and this can feel at odds with the detachment of technologically mediated vision. Unlike Morandi, who spent weeks deliberating on the exact placement of the five or six objects to which his painting would be devoted, Gnoli, it seems, wanted a more immediate, perhaps more theatrical, communion with his subject matter. Gnoli’s late paintings compress the pictorial space that Morandi’s pictures breathe. They betray a kind of wide-eyed fascination. It is almost as if a painting might be short sighted and has to lean in closer to find its focus – as if the picture were nuzzling up against the object.

The pleasure of Gnoli’s late paintings owes in part to the faint sense of impropriety at seeing the subject matter rendered so large. As if five massive mustard colour skirted armchairs were, in essence, a profoundly immodest proposition. Yet the tone of this pleasure belongs more to the child-like than the fetishistic. And at this scale a remarkable care can be given to surface appearances, to pattern and texture. The titles of these works are spare and matter of fact yet often exhaustive: Red Tie Knot (1969) describes everything in the painting save for the most marginal incursion of a white shirt. There is no outside to Elevator (1967). The field of vision is entirely flooded by the designated thing.  

Gnoli introduced sand into his acrylics after taking up painting full time in the mid-1950s. The minuscule protrusions in a medium which glistens when wet but dries matte catch the light, adding sparkle to the quotidian objects that fill his later compositions. In these paintings the grains of sand, as on a beach, vanish at a certain distance. A scale is assumed – on the beach this is a quality of its vastness, on the canvas a virtue of its scarcity – that makes the grains disappear. The soft, textured objects painted by Gnoli push out the edges of the canvas. They are extraordinarily convex, exuding an irrepressibly centrifugal energy, even when, as in Corner (1968), he is merely painting the ridge of a brick wall. 

One senses from Corner that the wall itself is of as little interest to Gnoli as any other partition. Its allure, as well as its utility as a support, lies in the wall’s accommodation of pattern, in the arrangement of bricks, the interplay of vertical and horizontal. Scale in these paintings often seems to come down to a question of shape, which in turn becomes a matter of pattern. Or one might say it the other way round: that it is pattern which gives onto shape and then scale. The notion of pattern might also be important in underlining the process of habituation of which these pictures form a part. Habituation to a scale, after a time, eliminates scale. It is a process which is as much about blocking out as it is about seeing.

With Morandi, who hardly ever left his home city, one imagines that the bottles and jugs grew to form a horizon and directed the proportions of his world as well as his pictures. The paintings used to remind John Berger ‘of an old woman wrapping up porcelain ornaments in tissue paper.’ This association, Berger observed, owed to the light which both warmed and muted the image. With Gnoli too, one can see paintings as participating in a ritual of putting away – he liked to say that his pictures amounted to an inventory. It is in collections of both artist’s work, in their grouping, that the clearest expression is given to the idiom of storing time with things in the image of an object.

But the ambience of memory one finds in Morandi’s pictures is of an altogether different quality than the peculiar mournfulness that haunts Gnoli’s pop exuberance. This is a crucial note of variance at the centre of what the two painters have most in common. Morandi’s inventory is not so much being compiled as in a process of perpetual recategorization, as if according to some enigmatic cipher. One might say that these paintings hold memory differently, except that, such is their essential similarity, it isn’t clear whether it is the same memory being captured across so many pictures, or so many memories lodged in the same picture. An ‘inventory of memories,’ the psychoanalyst J-B. Pontalis warns, may be ‘opposed to the work of memory.’ In such compilations the mnemonic image is savoured for its own sake rather than what it refers to. If the spacing out of bottles and jugs is a routine which initiates a conversation about time and its passing, there is a question kept open by Morandi’s still lifes about what is allowed to be forgotten and what is not. ‘Forgetting is necessary to give thickness to time,’ Pontalis writes, ‘a memory that would desire no loss is a dead memory.’

The question of proximity to a depicted object, in the case of both Morandi and Gnoli, seems inextricable from a sense that each painting is an attempt to bear with the impending loss of a sensuous experience. Perhaps it is this anxiety which is divulged by the way closeness is something to be either guarded or given up to. In the case of Morandi, this comes to seem almost a compulsion to work out what, precisely, would amount to a distance at which things can be safely held in mind. It is difficult to think about these pictures in this way without registering a poignancy imparted by the ebbing of a collective focus on Covid-19 and its privations. This winter, the Fondazione Prada in Milan held a survey of Gnoli’s work in the city’s post-industrial south-eastern suburbs, the last exhibition organized by the prolific curator and herald of Arte Povera, Germano Celant, before his death early in the pandemic. Leaving by the Lodi TBB metro station on the corner, now-familiar signs mandated the correct space one should maintain from others, implying that a regulated distance is something we would rather not keep.