Louise Giovanelli
‘Always Different, Always the Same’
23 February to 16 April 2023
Related Press: Artforum April 2023
Louise Giovanelli ‘Always Different, Always the Same’ contains a suite of newly commissioned site-specific paintings by one of the UK’s most prominent young painters. The exhibition takes British DJ John Peel's famous description of Manchester-band The Fall, images of the eucharist and contemporary spiritual reverie as its starting point.
With each work in Giovanelli’s exhibition appropriated from a single 1970s film still in which a young woman is offered bread and wine at the altar from a priest during a Catholic liturgy of the eucharist, her portraits render a striking yet unnamed cinematic moment open to evocative and provocative interpretation. Religious iconography, art history, contemporary celebrity, drug-taking, sex, and heightened emotional states are referenced, while a connection with reverie and revelation is strengthened by the artist’s use of Entheogen as the title for each painting, a word referring to the use of psychoactive substances that induce alterations in perception for the purpose of spiritual development, having been taken from the Greek Etheos, meaning ‘having a God in one’; ‘possessed’ and ‘divine’.
If Giovanelli’s paintings show traces of a distorted hallucinatory process, then they also owe a debt to the related structure of primitive art, the medieval and those of the Proto-Renaissance before the laws of western perspective became entrenched. For example, the artist’s evocative images contain little single point perspective and refer as much to the work of Duccio, Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca as they do to recently revaluated American ‘self-taught artists’ of the interwar years, such as Morris Hirshfield, whose non-illusionistic spaces use pattern and reference the applied arts.
Although spiritual energy, sensation, art-history, repetition and difference anchor this exhibition, Giovanelli’s recent works owe as much to her daily life in Manchester as they do her daily act of painting in the city. Currently hailing from Prestwich – the area of Greater Manchester that The Fall’s late Mark E. Smith also called home – the artist cites red brick, gothic architecture, mythic sprites, and local pubs as influences on her work, an example of which comes with the visual vocabulary of Prestwich’s The Church Inn, whose green tiles have led to the same tint in each iteration of Entheogen.
In addition, on a more detailed level, through her manipulation of light in repeated cinematic fragments, Giovanelli’s circle of bread loosely held in the mouth of its subject shifts to become a pill or a pool of bodily fluid, while the figure’s eyes slip back into their sockets in a ‘spaced out’ manner. Essentially, ambiguity, the illicit and rhythm reign in this work, in line with an ethical dimension that appears through a scrambling and subsequent reorganisation of the western canon alongside historical and contemporary truths. Connected to the direct imbibing of the holy (historically we might think of Bacchus, the God of wine), the pleasures of sex (in the case of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which resembles erotic exaltation), glamour, glittering pop idols, clubbing and contemporary places of worship that involve altered states, deep repetitive beats (be they techno, motoric, or the thudding bass of The Fall’s Blindness) and transcendence, the artist creates a sense of vertigo in relation to desire that reorganises our sense of history, time, space and duration in the present.
Louise Giovanelli (b. 1993, London) lives and works in Manchester, UK. She studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt (2018–20) under the tutelage of Amy Sillman, having received her BA from Manchester School of Art, UK, in 2015. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at White Cube, London, UK (2022); Manchester Art Gallery, UK (2019); Workplace Foundation, Gateshead, UK (2019); Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, UK (2018); The Grundy Gallery, Blackpool, UK (2016). Giovanelli’s work has been featured in group exhibitions that include ‘Mixing it Up’, Hayward Gallery, London (2021); AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (2021); and The Art House, Worcester, UK (2019).
