Enchanting the Modern: Gino De Dominicis at P.S. 1
by NKurchanova
Gino De Dominicis at P.S. 1. On view October 19, 2008 — February 9, 2009. 22 – 25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave, Long Island City.
P.S.1, the official affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City, has recently become a more attractive place of pilgrimage for art lovers than its revered parent. A series of exhibitions opening there this past month enhance this trend. Amongst them, Gino De Dominicis’ solo show stands out in scale and ambition. De Dominicis is relatively unknown in this country, but he has achieved a legendary stature in his native Italy. He entered the art scene in the late 1960sat the onset of the Conceptual art movement. Although the P.S.1 exhibition does feature some works from the late 1960s and early 1970s that appear to be influenced by this movement — such as a small drawing 1+0=0 or The Rubber Ball Dropped from Two Meters at the Moment Immediately Preceding the Bounce—the artist vigorously denies any ties to Conceptual art. According to Laura Cherubini, the curator of the exhibition, he always insisted on remaining outside the art “system” in order to oppose the dominance of the Duchampian readymade principle, underlying the Conceptualist aesthetic. In 1982 De Dominicis made an unequivocal gesture to that effect when he showed his painting In principio era l’immagine at the Sperone Gallery in Rome and displayed a toilet seat next to it to make the point that the painting was an art object, whereas the toilet seat was not, despite being shown in the same context.
Continuing the critique of Conceptual art by the Italian group Arte Povera De Dominicis made works such as the painting Zodiac, where he depicted animals, people, fishes, and ancient pottery with great truthfulness to life, all set against a bright blue background of photographic paper. Because De Dominicis is a very skillful draftsman, the painted figures, objects, and animals look like photographs. The entire work looks like a collage, which it is not — it is a painting. De Dominicis makes an unambiguous pictorial statement here in an attempt to return to images their power to enchant and transfix, rescuing them from their transformation into signs or ideas that could be best presented in ways not visual. In his audio recording D-IO, which broadcasts the artist’s laugh ad infinitum, De Dominicis literally makes fun of the multi-tasking of much of post-1960s art — of its stepping outside the strictly visual framework of a two-dimensional painting or drawing and engaging with theater, performance, architecture, and technology. The title of the piece clearly refers to the famous “0.10” exhibition of 1915 where Tatlin and Malevich displayed for the first time their iconoclastic works, such as three-dimensional counter-reliefs and Suprematist paintings, including the Black Square. In D-IO, however, the artist proclaimed himself the Creator with a capital “C” (“D” stands for De Dominicis; “IO” is Italian for “I”) and ridiculed the Russians’ attempt to extend art into three-dimensions for the benefit of the communal utopia (Tatlin) and to bring painting to its “zero degree” (Malevich). D-IO, shown as part of an installation including Unique Work: Unique Image of a Non-Existent Statue—a 1973 painting of a laughing statue of the Virgin — serves as the ultimate rebuttal to the attempts to bring art closer to the earth, to desublimate it.
In a predictable and even inevitable way, this quest to return the sacred aura to a work of art was extended by De Dominicis into his own life where he transformed himself into a mythic figure of sorts. As a result, unbelievable stories about the artist abound and, because of his eccentric personality, it is sometimes difficult to separate truth from fiction. From his friends and acquaintances we learn, for example, that he is an inveterate gambler; that he comes from a noble family wealthy enough to own palaces; that he likes the night life, wine, and women; and that he, as his friend Andrea Bellini says, always “demands and receives absolute devotion, unconditional love.” Giovanni Giuliani recalls that when he invited the artist to his palazzo to see the installation of one of his paintings, De Dominicis suggested sending an assistant to paint over the sixteenth-century frescoes on the ceiling, because he felt that they were making his work look less impressive. The supreme ego of the artist manifested itself on multiple occasions, which were transformed into stories and anecdotes by those who knew him as well as by the artist himself. As Alanna Heiss, the director of P.S. 1 recalled, describing his behavior at the 1972 Venice Biennale: “Gino spun tales and myths about himself without any corrective mechanism or inhibition. … He was known to intentionally mythologize his past to a point beyond lying, to a level where fantasy became confused with reality, by not only himself, but also those around him.” One of the most enduring myths that he perpetuated concerned his own death. He predicted his own death to the very hour, day, and year, and was supposed to have died on November 29, 1998 — a fact that still remains unchallenged by Wikipedia. In 1999 a posthumous exhibition was organized by Alanna Heiss; some friends deplored his untimely end, but some had the temerity to doubt its authenticity. They were incredulous, because even at the beginning of his artistic career in 1969, the poster announcing the artist’s first solo exhibition in Rome looked like an obituary. For the artist who suspended temporal sequence in his works and abolished the difference between the past, present, and future, this introduction was appropriate.
For De Dominicis, the medium of painting constitutes the supreme mode of artistic expression and what we see at P.S.1 this year is mostly paintings. Many of these paintings are meant to be icons — in form, technique, and spirit. The works are grouped not only by color — “golden” paintings in one room, “blue” in another, “red” in a third — but also by iconology. In different rooms De Dominicis investigates different attributes of iconic representation: for example, one room is devoted entirely to faces while backgrounds are the focus in another. A third room is dominated by studies in perspective, and clouds in a fourth. All of these studies are extremely abstracted and look as eternal as Brancusi’s sculpture.
In the “faces” series, for example, we can observe the incredibly fine work of a brush or a pencil tracing the contours of a three-quarter turn of the head or its profile we usually see on an icon: a fine aquiline nose, a beautifully rounded contour of the face, a Mona Lisa smile (at least in one Untitled painting). In the room dedicated to “backgrounds,” several canvases, display the lushness of the gold-leaf settings of Byzantine icons accentuated by what looks like almost accidental cut-outs of geometric figures — circles, lines, and triangles — which in fact may be painted on top of the gold. The artist is characteristically secretive about his materials and his methods: as a rule, labels do not clarify the subject of the work or the materials used.
Apart from icons and paintings inspired by religion and despite his dissociation from other artists, De Dominicis is strongly influenced by his compatriot Giorgio de Chirico. The “blue” room in particular has many of the same timeless, open vistas with sharp shadows and partially lit mysterious objects, and uninhabited landscapes. For many artists of his time, de Chirico exemplified a “new order” for which the European sensibility was yearning as a refuge from the Futurist and Dadaist turmoil and disintegration. The dimension of de Chirico’s pittura metafisica which brings the discombobulated world back together in an eerie, surreal, eternal space is definitely present in De Dominicis’ work, although he seems to pay more attention to materials, craftsmanship, and the sacred, awe-inspiring aspect of the work than de Chirico.
Death and eternal life are not the only subjects that De Dominicis deems worthy of exploring. Another recurrent theme in his work is unconditional, everlasting love. The basement room of the exhibition space, where Zodiac and D-IO are displayed, also features the Urvasi and Gilgamesh drawing from 1980, where — somewhat like in the Etant Donnés by Duchamp — a perspective opens up to our view. Instead of the Duchampian erotic spectacle, however, we see a Renaissance vista with lakes and mountains in the distance.
Upon closer inspection, it is clear the uneven edges framing the vista, which resemble a broken mirror, are in fact profiles of a woman and a man. The woman is Urvasi, a nymph from Indian mythology and the man is Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king and inventor who wished to live forever. As Gabriele Guercio remarks, for De Dominicis the imagined love between a celestial nymph and an earthly king, a goddess and a mortal, a woman and an artist exemplified a path to immortality. Apparently, the artist developed an interest in the Sumerians in the late 1970s, when he learned that the European civilization and spirituality may be traced to Sumerian myths, cultures, and institutions. The bringing together of an Indian goddess and a proto-European man who died several millennia ago into an image and a story about love is an act that transcends time and space, myth and reality, cultural borders between East and West and creates a beautiful legend, which we all want to believe. Consistent defiance of the laws of narrative and history brings De Dominicis to the image as the only force that is able to bear witness to what is left sacred to man — his immortality.
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