AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY

In 1973 Gino De Dominicis was invited to present a room of his own at the

“Contemporanea” exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at Villa Borghese in Rome. In the room there was also a photographic portrait taken by Elisabetta Catalano, under which the artist wrote a piece on the subject of identity, starting off with the words:

“Portrait from life of an artist…” This means it was a portrait (a genre that the artist took up in painting during his final years) which was not only authorized, but even used within a work of his own and on a number of occasions. Confirmation of this can be seen in a picture of De Dominicis — a mental operation of the artist who, in 1975, had himself photographed full-length by Buby Durini while concealing his face behind the portrait by Elisabetta Catalano, which in this case acts as a mask: De Dominicis has himself replaced by his own portrait. A way of evading photography through photography itself. But it should also be pointed out that the artist used photography in some works of his, such as foto ricordo (snapshot), the Tentativo di far formare dei

quadrati invece che dei cerchi attorno a un sasso che cade nell’acqua (Attempt to form squares instead of circles around a stone falling into water), and the photo of the Madonna che ride (Laughing Madonna) as a non-existent statue (after the work was destroyed) and others. Each work seems to choose its own technique, and photography too is allowed in among them.

TIME AND THE MIRROR

One example of the complex system of relationships in the work of De Dominicis between the illusory space of painting and the real space of environment — and, at the same time, of the dialectic between space and time — can be seen in the work shown in 1988 at Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples. In Arte visiva e immortalità Gabriele Guercio described it like this: “Taking up his Specchio che tutto riflette tranne gli esseri viventi (Mirror That  Reflects Everything Except for Living Beings) (1969, later destroyed), the artist performed a total elimination of the public and of everything that moved in the exhibition space. In the dimly lit room, a projector illuminated a panel in black tempera, with Urvasi and Gilgamesh seen in profile, in silver-gray pencil, and a shining polyhedron at the level of their eyes. On the wall opposite the painting an oval frame looked just like a mirror, but when one went up to it, one could see that the ‘mirror’ reflected the room and the painting, but not the visitors. Discovering the trick —

which was that of making two symmetrical rooms with two identical paintings — is less important than grasping the outcome. The ‘mirror,’ which reflects everything except for anything that moves or is alive, removes and projects both works of art into a dimension that is totally alien to that of the spectators. By contrasting the permanence of the two paintings with the transience of the spectators, it strengthens the idea of timeless art and the destiny of the public.” De Dominicis’s solution to the problem of immortality was beginning to take shape: it is the destiny of painting,

not of man, and — we might add — of the work, not of the artist. 

PICTOR MAXIMUS

The enchantment of a face that emerges from subtle and skillful signs; the fascination of a glance that opens up in an inner and an outer world: this could well be the introduction to the paintings of Gino De Dominicis. An enigmatic smile, one eye closed and the other open — these are the characteristics attributed to a male face on canvas and a female face on wood, which enters the work with its veining. Drawing was a mainstay in the work of this artist, though he did not exclude other forms of expression. Drawing and painting were accompanied by three-dimensional works. These elements sometimes appear in his painting — the rod, for example, returns

a number of times, also in the large panel where the two faces brush against each other. De Dominicis’s style surprisingly reveals a gift for drawing. In his works, and especially in his drawings, they often return to the human face and, especially, to the female figure. In painting, he achieved almost unimaginable results. He achieved the height of complexity and the greatest harmony with the almost paradoxical use of simple, traditional and essential means: a panel, tempera and pencil.

In the most important part of De Dominicis’s works — the face — there is always

a gap in some detail. The miracle of painting is that it renders a physiognomy in

just a few lines, in a few rapid marks that are sometimes barely hinted at, sometimes more close-knit and light. In some cases the gap consists of the nose, the element that links the upper, more spiritual part of the face to the lower part, which is excessively elongated. This deformation, which came from drawing, can also be seen in the large skeleton that lies motionless as the hyperbole of the human figure reduced to the bone, and differentiated only by an appendage — the nose — which is the

missing part of a skeleton. In the artist’s view, the languages of the figurative arts are characterized by their relationship with matter and immobility. Even when he portrayed living people, De Dominicis showed them motionless. The absence of a process of time is another characteristic. The presence of the work of art is absolute.

KALI-YUGA IN FULL SWING

In Indian philosophy, Kali-yuga is a calamitous era, verging on collapse caused by a total loss of values. The fact that he gave the title “in pieno Kali-yuga” to his last exhibition, which opened at the Emilio Mazzoli Gallery in Modena on 30 May, 1998, six months before he died, is indicative of De Dominicis’s ideas about what was taking place in reality and in art all around him. His painting acquired depth and turned outwards, combining different spatial qualities. In a certain sense this type of work was anticipated by densely material painting, which was almost in relief, like the small but dense profile of 1980. Gabriele Guercio said of the exhibition: “Many of the works were paintings of faces or figures with cone-shaped noses that lengthened out like beaks or trunks, sometimes three-dimensional (modeled in clay and covered with paint). For example, in the violet and yellow figure on a black background, called Con titolo (Titled) of 1985, the three-dimensional cone-shaped nose is almost as long as half the entire body.

On the subject of Sumerian art, André Malraux talked of a “beak-shaped nose inherited from the prehistoric bird-man.” The reference to Sumerian civilization is certainly plausible, but this element of the nose is more than anything a powerful intellectual invention. The container becomes a sort of miniature architecture inhabited by a figure that becomes both painting and sculpture. The proportions between the whole and the part become far more important. The question that Nicolas Bourriaud

poses himself in an essay republished in the catalogue for which this text originally appeared — how to restore power to images without precipitating into the ideology of

the aura, which has fallen into disrepute in this “age of technical reproducibility” —

finds an answer in Gino De Dominicis. His work aims to reconstitute that incomparable, inveterate, irrevocable aura, but this time as art’s solution to the problem, posed by modern science, of entropy, the dispersion of the energy which art, on the contrary, concentrates and cultivates in the gift of the work.

Gino De Dominicis talks with a large painting with a female subject in front of him. In the end he turns to this figure and asks: “Is it true?” And the living painting replies:

“Yes.”

(Translated from Italian by Simon Turner)

Gino De Dominicis was born in Ancona, Italy, in 1947. He died in Rome in 1998.

Laura Cherubini is a curator, art critic and Professor of Art History at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Brera, Milan. She lives and works in Rome and Milan. 

PART 1 – CLICK HERE