“I'm always striving for narrative ambiguity in my work. It’s important not to give too much away, as then the painting becomes an illustration rather than a painting - there’s an important difference, and when that happens it loses power. Paintings that captivate me are ones where there are gaps in knowing. For me, ambiguity is what sustains a painting and makes it endure.”
—Louise Giovanelli

British-born artist Louise Giovanelli creates opulent, tactile images of transitory moments. Whether a fleeting gesture – a hand holding a glass of wine, bodies dancing, eyelids closing – or a focus on everyday materials – hair, fabric, foliage – her compositions are seductively rendered in dazzling light and luminous oil.  Living in London and Manchester, and completing her MFA in Frankfurt, Giovanelli takes her inspiration from a wide variety of subject matter, from Northern Renaissance Old Masters to Absolutely Fabulous’ Patsy Stone.

 

Regardless of the original source, Giovanelli’s hyper-focused compositions and lucid application of paint turn the ordinary into the profound, creating vivid works that encourage us to take notice of the smaller details around us. In An Ex, we are confronted with a dark image of thick folds, from an indistinct foliage, demonstrating the artist’s deft command of light and tone. Across the canvas we see deep furrows, cutting into the vegetation and creating an ‘X’ shape, which provides both a structurally sound composition and an amusingly literal relationship with the title of the piece. Represented by White Cube and GRIMM Gallery, Giovanelli has held solo exhibitions in London, Amsterdam, Rome and New York. Her work is held in the collections of Tate, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the National Museum of Oslo, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Hort Family Collection, New York; and The Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo.

 

 

Despite her use of such a traditional medium as oil, Giovanelli’s work reflects an avant-garde freshness. She manipulates and distorts perspective, often by rotating and cropping images on her phone, in a way that isolates traditional subject matter – curtains, folds of fabric, hair or plants.ⁱ This detachment of subject from context allows us to really consider material physicality: its texture and how it reflects and refracts light. These close-cropped compositions, especially in An Ex’s vegetative subject matter, are evocative of pioneering 20^th-century artist Georgia O’Keeffe. In works like Jimson Weed, O’Keeffe, represents flowers in hyper-focused compositions, removing them from their usual contexts and creating sumptuously rendered forms that verge on abstraction. The same can be seen in An Ex’s sensual depiction of plant-like forms, hinting at a subject, but refusing to ever reveal itself fully to the viewer.

 

Giovanelli creates the effect of spatial depth within her work by interrupting the surface and composition of her canvases. In some paintings, like those of curtains, this may take the form of a semi-opaque glaze, whereas in An Ex, this is several thin, white lines scrawled across the canvas. This form of mark making takes the form of ‘glitches’ in an otherwise perfected composition. Aside from highlighting pictorial space, these interruptions in Giovanelli’s methodically painted works create a dialogue between aestheticism and temporality; whilst her near-symmetry is punctuated, these gestural ‘glitches’ also create an ephemeral moment, as if we have ‘just missed or about to perceive an action taking place’.ⁱⁱ

“If you’re a painter, you really have to understand where your medium has come from, you have to understand history. Just to use the act of painting, to make a mark, is to hold all of that baggage of history with you.” 
—Louise Giovanelli

Living in Frankfurt whilst completing her MFA, Giovanelli began to immerse herself in the world of the Northern Renaissance, stating that it was ‘the first period of influence that I was really struck by… [I] was always fascinated with how they created those textures’.ⁱⁱⁱ Artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden’s beautifully rendered details captured her imagination: ‘contorted fingers, fingers in books, or the bottoms of dresses with tiny, tiny feet’.^vi In acutely replicating these details, Giovanelli began to adopt the technique used by master oil painters of the Renaissance era – a process of applying very light layers and allowing them plenty of time to dry.  

 

It is the patience that comes with such delicate applications of oil that suffuses Giovanelli’s works with such luminosity. She creates depth within forms, the many layers of paint culminating in a velveteen appearance of inherent painterly luxury. Whilst she is known for her brilliant, phosphorescent use of colour, An Ex is a masterclass in creating beautifully rendered realism with a limited palette. The effect of this is not dissimilar to the technique adopted by Renaissance masters – such as van Eyck – of grisailles: paintings executed using a monochromatic palette of neutral greys. Without the distraction of other colours, the artist is forced to focus on sound composition and expert use of light and shadow. The Annunciation Diptych is one such example, and the influence of the way van Eyck executes sumptuous, undulating folds in his gowns can be seen in the lascivious ruffles of An Ex’s dark vegetation.

 

Giovanelli's mastery of oil paint positions this medium at the forefront of contemporary art, drawing a lineage with Old Masters with her dichotomous mix of old and new, abstract and figurative. Nevertheless, her works are anything but antiquated. A clever manipulation of perspective and interaction with spatial planes provides a distinctly contemporary, digital feel to a medium that has been used for centuries.

 

Collector’s Digest

• Louise Giovanelli is a British-born artist known for her lucid, hyper focused oil paintings. Represented by White Cube and GRIMM Gallery, she has recently held solo exhibitions from February to June this year in New York and Manchester, respectively.

• Her work is held in the collections of Tate, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the National Museum of Oslo, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Hort Family Collection, New York; and The Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo.

• It has recently been announced that Giovanelli will be the recipient of a solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2024.

 

 

ⁱ Louise Giovanelli, quoted in Lara Johnson-Wheeler, ‘Louise Giovanelli, the Artist Fusing Old Masters and Digital Imagery’, AnOther Magazine, 11 July, 2022, online.

ⁱⁱ Louise Giovanelli, quoted in ‘Deliberate Repetition: A Conversation with Louise Giovanelli’, JUXTAPOZ, 27 November, 2020, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Louise Giovanelli, quoted in Lara Johnson-Wheeler, ‘Louise Giovanelli, the Artist Fusing Old Masters and Digital Imagery’, AnOther Magazine, 11 July, 2022, online.

^iv Louise Giovanelli, quoted in Louis Wise, ‘Louise Giovanelli: the painter mixing the Old Masters with Mariah Carey’, Financial Times, 10 June, 2022, online.