English | Français

Sunday 16 February

Louise Giovanelli, the Magician of Sacred Surfaces

Published on: 13 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

Louise Giovanelli transforms moments of pop culture into transcendent pictorial experiences. Her meticulous technique, inspired by Flemish masters, creates a constant tension between materiality and immateriality, where each layer of paint becomes a threshold to a new perceptual dimension.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, while I tell you about Louise Giovanelli, born in 1993 in London, who is redefining the codes of contemporary painting with an audacity that makes the small world of contemporary art tremble. This British artist, trained at the Manchester School of Art and the prestigious Städelschule in Frankfurt under the tutelage of Amy Sillman, is not simply painting pictures. No, she is creating a new form of visual sacrality that transcends traditional boundaries between popular culture and high culture.

Her pictorial technique is a true tour de force that deserves our attention. Inherited from Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, it consists of meticulously superimposing layers of ultra-pigmented oil paint, thus creating a luminosity that seems to emanate from within the canvas itself. This methodical approach recalls Walter Benjamin’s observations on the aura of the artwork. But where Benjamin saw an inexorable loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, Giovanelli achieves the impossible: she creates a new form of sacrality from profane images drawn from our saturated visual culture.

Her series of paintings “Orbiter” (2021) perfectly illustrates this transmutation of the profane into the sacred. Taking as her subject a simple detail of Mariah Carey’s sequined dress during a Christmas show, she transforms what could be considered a trivial moment of pop culture into a transcendent visual experience. The pictorial surface becomes a fascinating battleground between the materiality of paint and the immateriality of light. This approach echoes Roland Barthes’s theories on photography in “Camera Lucida”, where he develops the concept of punctum. In Giovanelli’s work, each brushstroke becomes a potential punctum, creating a permanent tension between the visible and invisible that forces the viewer to slow down their gaze.

The curtains, a recurring motif in her recent work, deserve our attention. These monumental drapes, which can reach up to 3 meters in height, are not simple decorative elements or style exercises. They become metaphysical portals, thresholds between different states of consciousness. In “Prairie” (2022), a spectacular triptych, the iridescent green curtains are crossed by slits of pure yellow light that create a palpable dramatic tension. This use of the curtain as an existential metaphor recalls Gaston Bachelard’s reflections in “The Poetics of Space” on the dialectics of inside and outside. Giovanelli’s curtain is no longer a simple object; it becomes a place of transition between the real and the imaginary, between the mundane and the transcendent.

But it is in her treatment of cult film scenes that Giovanelli reveals her full subversive power. Her reinterpretation of scenes from Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” transcends simple cinematic citation. In “Altar” (2022), she captures that precise moment when blood falls on Sissy Spacek, transforming it into a sort of pagan epiphany. The surface of the painting vibrates with an almost hallucinatory intensity, creating what Georges Didi-Huberman would call a “surviving image”. The saturated neons and blurring effects create an unreal atmosphere that transforms this horror scene into a moment of mystical revelation.

The artist pushes her exploration of the boundaries between sacred and profane even further in her “Surface to air” series (2022), where elongated legs emerge from the slit of a shimmering dress. These paintings reference the Corinthian columns of classical architecture, creating a bold parallel between sacred architecture and contemporary glamour. This unexpected juxtaposition forces us to reconsider our relationship with pop culture icons and their quasi-religious status in our society.

Giovanelli’s technique is just as remarkable as her thematic choices. Her way of working with paint in successive thin layers creates an optical depth reminiscent of old masters’ glazing effects. But she uses this traditional technique to create resolutely contemporary effects. In her paintings of wine glasses, for example, she manages to create effects of refraction and distortion that transform these everyday objects into vehicles for metaphysical contemplation. These contemporary still lifes remind us of 17th-century vanitas paintings while remaining firmly anchored in our time.

What makes Giovanelli’s work particularly relevant today is her ability to navigate between different cultural registers with disconcerting ease. She draws from both art history and popular culture, creating works that resist easy categorization. Her approach to the sacred is not nostalgic or reverential, but rather exploratory and transformative. She shows us that the sacred has not disappeared from our modern world; it has simply moved to new territories.

The treatment of light in her paintings is particularly interesting. Rather than representing light in a traditional way, she creates luminous effects that seem to emanate from within the canvas itself. This approach recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories on the “flesh of the visible”. The textures she achieves are not simple surface effects but become tangible manifestations of this flesh of the world that the philosopher spoke of.

There is in her work a permanent tension between revelation and concealment that recalls Martin Heidegger’s concept of “unconcealment”. Each painting is like an aletheia, a truth that reveals itself while concealing itself. This dialectic is particularly evident in her close-up paintings of faces, where the subject’s identity dissolves into the pictorial matter, creating what Jacques Derrida might have called a visual “différance”.

Her way of working with repetition is also significant. By revisiting certain motifs – curtains, glasses, faces – she creates what Gilles Deleuze would call “differences in repetition”. Each iteration of a motif brings subtle variations that enrich our understanding of the subject. This serial approach recalls Claude Monet’s “Variations” on Rouen Cathedral, but with a resolutely contemporary sensibility.

Giovanelli’s treatment of textures is particularly remarkable. Whether dealing with sequins, glass, velvet, or silk, she manages to create surfaces that are both sensual and conceptual. These textures are not simply represented; they are transfigured by the pictorial process. In her paintings, a simple velvet curtain can become as mysterious as Veronica’s veil, as enigmatic as a Rothko painting.

Her way of framing subjects is just as brilliant. By isolating specific details from their original contexts, she creates what Roland Barthes would call paradoxical “reality effects”. These fragments become autonomous entities that generate their own meaning. This strategy of decontextualization recalls Craig Owens’s theories on postmodern allegory, where the fragment becomes more significant than the whole.

Louise Giovanelli offers us a profound reflection on the very nature of representation in our image-saturated world. She transforms ephemeral moments of popular culture into lasting pictorial experiences, thus creating a new type of contemporary iconography. Her work is not simply a critique of the society of spectacle, but a bold attempt to create a new form of transcendence from the debris of our visual culture.

Her painting reminds us that contemporary art does not need to reject tradition to be relevant. On the contrary, it is by creatively dialoguing with art history that she manages to create something truly new. She shows us that painting in the 21st century can no longer be content with being a simple medium of representation. It must become a place of alchemical transformation where the banal becomes extraordinary, where the profane becomes sacred. And that is precisely what Giovanelli achieves: transforming our view of the world, one brushstroke at a time.

Reference(s)

Louise GIOVANELLI (1993)
First name: Louise
Last name: GIOVANELLI
Gender: Female
Nationalitie(s):

  • United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Age: 32 years old (2025)

Follow me

ArtCritic

FREE
VIEW