Paolo Serra decodes Gino De Dominicis's paradoxical silent system

Paolo Serra's new book tackles the paradox of Gino De Dominicis (GDD), an artist who made elusiveness and invisibility his signature. Serra argues that De Dominicis's work cannot be catalogued linearly; instead, he reconstructs the creative adventure by entering the paradoxical logic that runs through it. The book aims to discover De Dominicis's 'silent system,' though Serra acknowledges this discovery is destined to remain incomplete. Key challenges include the near-total absence of photographs—only a few images exist, all produced within the artist's own corpus—and the artist's deliberately misleading writings and statements. Serra proposes that time is the true problem of De Dominicis's work: the artist rejected a linear, cause-effect history, instead treating time as the essence that composes works while simultaneously disrupting their meaning. De Dominicis's fascination with Sumerians, ancient mythology, and figures like the Count of Saint-Germain, De Chirico, and Duchamp placed him both inside and outside his own time. Serra's method mirrors the artist's paradox: he proceeds by looking backward and finding in future works the reasons for past ones.