Domenico Gnoli Quotes

My themes are derived from current events, from familiar situations, from daily life, because I never actively intervene against the object, I can feel the magic of its presence.

I am metaphysical inasmuch as I am looking for a non-eloquent painting, immobile and of atmosphere, which feeds on static situations.

I can only speak for myself but for me imagination and invention cannot generate something more important, more beautiful and more terrifying than the common object, amplified by the attention that we give it. An object alone, in front of me who is alone, exactly in front of me just as I would like to have in front of me someone who really interests me, in a good light to better observe it.

The performance on the stage has its reasons in the performance induced in thousands of separate minds and this second performance is no less prodigious than the first.

All I know is that mine was a completely new theory about art, a new approach that made the pictures appear just like life does.

I was born knowing that I had to be a painter, because my father, an art historian, always presented painting as the only acceptable thing in life.

I love America. I lived here too but my links are exclusively Italian.

I don't want to think that I am going to believe that I am a hell of a genius, or anything like that.

My life provides me with these images that become expressions of my daily experience.

I know how pathetically inadequate my medium [painting] is, but unfortunately I dispose of no other.

There isn't much to say about my childhood. I remember explosions of intense happiness, followed shortly afterwards by profound melancholy that always prompted remarks and comments from those around me on how remote my life was from my age. Therefore I rapidly lost all my respect for age. From then on, I always lived without any age, given that every year I used to repudiate it, choosing another one for the sole good reason that I liked it better.

An audience is perhaps unnecessary to the soul-searching mystic, but it is vital to the magician, the maker of prodigies.

I couldn't get used to the community and social life of a theatrical set designer.

If an artist has the possibility to contact an infinitely larger public through the pages of a publication, he should try to invest more rather than less and go as far in his effort to communicate his inner image as he can.

I never lost the taste and craft of the Renaissance.

I call prodigy all that is invented, all that begins to exist from the second it is conceived, it is the process not the results, the principle and not the fruits.

I haven't even ever wanted to distort. I isolate and represent.

Prodigy only feeds on prodigy, fantasy on fantasy.

I always use given and simple elements, I don't want to add or subtract anything.

For many years it was difficult for me to paint because I didn't feel the informal painting that was then tyrannically dominating painters and art collectors.

I never tried to stage, to fabricate an image.

Life can be considered as a huge wardrobe, with so many dominos hung in its cupboards, one domino per year. Now I don't see why I couldn't change my mask in this wardrobe even twice a day.

Only thanks to Pop Art, my painting has become understandable.

You begin looking at things and they look just fine, as normal as ever, but then you look for a while longer and your feelings get involved and they begin changing things for you and they go on and on till you only see your feelings, and that's why you see this mess.