Gino De Dominicis


 

Nicolas Bourriaud
"Gino De Dominicis on the trail of Gilgamesh"
Flash Art, Milano, summer 1990

Leaving aside a certain reputation for abstruseness what makes it difficult to read into works by artists such as de Dominicis is not so much the structure of the pieces themselves but the overloaded clamorous context in which we see them. However the difficulties begin with an anachronism the somewhat strained anonymity (albeit an inimediately recognizable anonymity) of the artist's style. The second difficulty comes from the weighty silence opened up, by the Italian artist's method, a silence which gives the impression of remoteness when seen in its surroundings. It would be churlish, let alone inappropriate,to wax on at this point about the works's mystical content because de Dominicis' spirituality never comes over as something transcendental even if that is where it borrows its imagery. His is a world populated by solemn figures, paradoxical and ambiguous apparitions, their spirituality constantly hindered, their accession into the celestial forever thwarted by the ugly, sometimes grotesque appearance they are given. Elephantine priests with outsized, antenna-like noses and skeletons on roller-skates grate against a religious cqnnotation they would seem to mimic rather than personify. What de Dominicis presents us with are intermediary figures somewhere between the clownesque and the essential, figures whjçh rather than set us alight by their intrinsic force, set off tiny spiritual sparks within us which only the overall scope covered by the exhibition can bring together. In an eloquent show at the Magasin de Grenoble, the artist's indications, have been carried out, making for a labyrinthine setting with occasional clearings, metaphorically reflecting de Dominicis' desire to mislead, which, in fact, runs through the whole exhibition. It would take an infra-minimal notion of art history to best guide us through this maze. It was Duchamp who wrote, "The great artist of tomorrow will go underground," which is precisely what de Dominicis has set out to do with uncommon determination. He comes into infra-minimal territory in a piece where a red balloon has come to rest on the sun, the title of the piece suggesting that the balloon is just about to bounce off again. We might dig a little deeper into the apparent obscurity of the piece by suggesting that it evokes the Dhaman-Hindi theory whereby life is made up of invisible stitches like a badly put together film. Whatever the case, when dealing with de Dominicis' work, we are forced to leave behind the lexicon of art criticism and its attendant methodology and instead to immerse ourselves in the exercise of decoding less conceivable cultural phenomena as in Assyrian or Sumerian theologies, fraught with obscure tradition. Should we really be interpreting these outsized noses as signs of perspicacity and intuition and are the numerous references to Gilgamesh as indicative of the quest for immortality as they at first appear? Gilgamesh, in Sumerian mythology, is the hero of the sun par excellence while in these works he could well represent blindness; it is difficult to know because saturation is a key principle here, with too much to see, too much silence, too much obviousness and too much mystery making the appearance of these figures amount to
much the same thing. In an untitled piece from 1986, an ensemble of lines form, in perfect perspective, a curious, yellow landing strip, overhung by a tapering nose and a cross. The ambivalence and reversibility of this composition of signs leads us to the conclusion that de Dominicis' iconography is anything but static: by sheer obviousness and an almost medieval implicity, he drains and relieves the signs of their primary meaning. The artist puts on a tragic spectacle of our own incapacity to grasp the signs of immortality wherein hapless, dislocated puppets with no pretense of divinity, ask not to be contemplated but revived. In this respect, de Dominicis is still on the trail of Gilgamesh, the quest for immortality, which, in art at least, is in need of permanent reappraisal. In 1969, the artist himself said, "To really exist, one has to be able to stop inside of time." The overview afforded by this show - the oldest pieces come from the 1960s - clearly retraces the succession of forms this desire to stop time have taken on in de Dominicis' work; the fossil (the Pompeian skeleton struck dead while walking his dog), the arrested image (the red balloon), the purity of crystal and the metamorphosis, perfectly captured in a 1986 painting with its fusion of greyish, long-nosed figures set against a suitably gloomy background. The theoretical problem raised by this exhibition of work based entirely on the untopical, is the distance to be found today in relation to the image; how can it be given back its power without foundering in an ideology relegated to "the era of technical reproducibility?" How can one go about reconstructing a contemporary, as in active, iconography? These are all problems that de Dominicis' whirl of signs confronts like a chess player with a consumate sense of ruse. Mere speculation? Maybe. Let us say that as a painter of impossible transcendency, de Dominicis is not unlike the lighthousekeeper, his signals sweeping the horizon for the benefit of a ship that might never come in. The lesson to be learned is that of Melville's Moby Dick: there is nothing to discover in it but the sea, in other words, an expanse which has been covered.

(Translated from French by Christopher Martin)
Nicolas Bourriaud is a Paris-based critic.