I. De Profundis: From the Depths

In her first museum exhibition in Austria and Germany, the British painter Louise Giovanelli presents ten works produced especially for three consecutive exhibitions, as well as further older works. As the title A Song of Ascents suggests, these works have both spiritual or religious and strongly musical points of reference, articulated on several levels. And the title also stands for Giovanelli’s artistic idioms—her haptic paintings oscillate between abstraction and f iguration, are often highly naturalistic, and use several layers of paint, and they all share a sense of spirituality, something evidently transcendent that indicates another realm. But Giovanelli also addresses secular themes, such as the search for identity against the background of economic, structural, and social upheaval, and ecstasy and pleasure, both with and without the use of intoxicating substances. She addresses youthfulness and the young generation, and their search for meaning and orientation— or rather their lack of orientation, as well as the testing out and crossing of boundaries, and also the endless energy that this phase of life brings to bear. 

The original Song of Ascents is a series of fifteen psalms from the Old Testament, numbers 120 to 134, which together form one self-contained song. These psalms are often sung during the three great processions of Passover, Whitsun, and the Feast of the Tabernacles. In these contexts, the “ascent” is thus both metaphorical, standing for the journey to the beyond and to God, and also literal, encouraging Jewish and Christian pilgrims to set off on their journeys. In Giovanelli’s exhibition, the title is allegorical, reflecting her interest in transcendental states. The concept of transcendence refers to a dimension of experience that lies beyond the scope of the human senses and of visually accessible reality. It concerns a different reality beyond what can be seen, often connected to the idea of a divine or infinite original realm, and contrasting with immanence, which describes the world as experienced by our senses. 

At the same time Giovanelli refers to Oscar Wilde’s open letter De Profundis (1905). He wrote it from prison to his lover Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, describing his ambivalent relationship to God, and also expressing his lack of faith. Wilde gave the manuscript to Robert Ross, another former lover, who published the letter in 1905, five years after Wilde’s death, under the title De Profundis based on Psalm 130. In this sense Giovanelli establishes an autobiographical level. She comes from an Italian-Irish and traditionally Catholic family, calls herself an atheist, but nonetheless has great respect for religion and religious iconography, which she uses in her metaphysical paintings.

Giovanelli is interested in the fact that notwithstanding the increasing absence of religious practice in public space, there remain places for ceremonies, for devotion, and for our striving for transcendence—on visual, sound, and tactile levels. This is why she frequently thematizes places in her paintings that have come in the course of modernism’s turn away from religion to take the place of the church: night clubs and other places where people gather to hear music, where there are moments of excess, of intoxication, and unleashed joy. The ambiguity of Giovanelli’s works derives from her striving for beauty and sensuality being at the same time accompanied by darker and uncanny perspectives and imagery. 

The title of this show also reflects the artist’s own training in classical music in her childhood and youth. She is frequently inspired by electronic and experimental music, such as the work of Aphex Twin, who also integrates classical music into his work, as in his Avril 14th, a piece that is grounded by the piano that was used as the soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). It stands as a powerful example of how music has the potential to take us into different emotional states. This is also a feature of painting, and particularly of Louise Giovanelli’s work. It is often this power that painting has to evoke emotions that has sustained the idea since antiquity that creator and work are not just similar but in fact identical. Even when painters remained anonymous or absent, their creative personalities were nevertheless projected onto their works. For Isabelle Graw the “imaginary link between the artist and her product (is) particularly strong,” and also connected to “vitalist fantasies.”¹ These are discernible, for example, in the brushstrokes that can be seen as the hand and signature of the artist.

In Giovanelli’s work, this consists of several layers of oil paint and overlapping brushstrokes, a combination of neon and darker colors that place her pictures very much in our present day, even when they contain references to earlier epochs and decades. These colors give these paintings a very special materiality that can trigger a highly haptic wish to actually touch them. They take inspiration particularly from the Renaissance—French for rebirth: a cultural period over three centuries between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age (c. 1420 to 1600), and a time when realistic depictions in both portrait painting and in perspective entered into art.

Modern painting can be seen as a discourse formation in the sense of Michel Foucault, emerging with the establishment and rise of modernism in the eighteenth century, and as an institution shaped since then by academies and discourses. In this context, painting cannot be seen as something “given” that was always somehow “there,” but rather as in constant genesis. In particular after the Early Modern Age, between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, we can see a development in painting whereby frescoes, altarpieces, and book illustrations were still practiced but stepped significantly into the background, while painting on canvas gradually came to replace panel painting and became the dominant form in the nineteenth century. 

Giovanelli’s paintings often allude to Dutch Renaissance painting, successor to the late Gothic, such as works by Jan Vermeer, and also to Italian Renaissance painting, such as the work of Titian (Tiziano Vecellio). These artists frequently painted curtains and drapes as important stylistic elements of their works, representing the tension between physical materiality and immaterial devotion and prayer. Like these works, Giovanelli’s canvases are dominated by draped cloths and particularly curtains. 

At the same time, when viewing Louise Giovanelli’s works a certain teleological approach, such as that which distinguishes between modernism and postmodernism, is suspended, as she uses visual elements from all the ages. In this sense it is difficult to consider Giovanelli’s painting through the lens of a genuinely linear art-historical or academic perspective. She draws on a great number of different motifs, from the Renaissance or from the twentieth century, in particular pop-cultural symbols and metaphors from the 1970 to the 1990s. 

In her large canvases, Louise Giovanelli captures moments of the ephemeral; by using a specific texture that to a degree evokes the medium of film, she lays matters open and makes them visible. She often draws on pop-cultural points of reference, such as Brian De Palma’s film Carrie (1976), a horror movie based on the novel of the same title by Stephen King that addresses strict religiosity and superhuman powers. 

Giovanelli is always aiming to create psychologically charged liminal spaces. This is shown in her narrowly drawn faces, often in ecstatic states of mind, and also in her attention to details such as locks of hair seen as if through a magnifying glass. Her entire oeuvre is characterized by ambiguity, oscillating between figuration and abstraction and yet also seeming realistic—painting in an in-between space. Her works contain an inherent duality between components that can be both revered and that can also seduce, both in terms of media and materials. Giovanelli’s works truly offer sensual and extrasensory experience. The effects they generate can be described as mythical, as their visual surfaces invite us to enter and to immerse ourselves within them.