II. Curtains as Metaphors and Pop Culture

Louise Giovanelli has produced five paintings of curtains for this exhibition: Scala, Decades, Stoa, Dado, and its variation Dado (all 2024). Curtains have become a common motif in contemporary art — as sculptures, room dividers, and motifs in paintings. Giovanelli’s depictions are in suggestive paintings that have an almost old-masterly appearance, and are based on real curtains she saw in working men’s clubs. In the course of several visits, she photographed them and created her paintings on the basis of a selection of these photos.

A working men’s club is an organization whose members and supporters belong to the traditional working class in the United Kingdom, offering leisure and educational activities. They are particularly strong in the industrial north of England, and also in Ireland and even Australia. In their heyday in the 1970s there were around 4,000 such clubs with more than four million members in the United Kingdom.

These working men’s clubs can also be seen as the birthplace of British pop culture with its magnificent pop music, places where people came together and where at this grassroots level there is a stage for often outstanding musicians to be discovered. Amateurs too are significant here, working as cover bands and just for the fun of it. These clubs are still today places where games such as bingo are played, where people socialize and forget their often difficult everyday lives, and where performances, especially of music, are central. The curtains found in these clubs are not just a kind of façade denoting the edge of the stage where these performances take place and local bands play. These curtains are similar to classical theater curtains, but they do not represent a division between stage and audience, but rather a kind of backdrop in both a formal and a decorative sense. Often made of satin or brushed nylon, and illuminated by LED lamps, these curtains decorate the stages, which are usually on a slightly higher level at the side of the room and carpeted. 

Giovanelli’s curtains are the largest paintings she has hitherto made, and they refer to other themes and periods than her former works, linking elements from the period between the 1970s and the 1990s like an archivist with the associative imagery of the Renaissance. These works represent an impressive social and pop-cultural as well as aesthetic point of reference with a highly performative element. Their colors shine out from within, pulling viewers immersivity into the scene. The intensity of these works with their additional haptic features derives from the use of numerous layers of paint that the artist applies directly to the canvas and mixes there; the process begins with a white gesso that primes the canvas, followed by a full layer of undercoat in a bright neon color, and then a darker layer through which the previous bright layer shines out — in particular in Stoa, for example. The abstraction here is close to reality, in that these successively applied layers of paint create a dynamic effect that is inherent to curtains themselves. Giovanelli succeeds in transforming color into light that radiates and oscillates, painting the folds in the curtains so that they seem literally real. 

In her investigation of the interplay of light, color, and texture, Giovanelli examines the curtain’s folds and the shadows cast by these and expands this to whatever may be behind the curtain. She creates a nearly three-dimensional perspective on the canvas, a trompe l’œil that reveals the performativity of painting itself. In the seventeenth century, paintings were often hidden in domestic interiors behind curtains, and shown only on certain occasions. With the development of increasingly realistic painting techniques, curtains were integrated as part of the composition of the paintings. Like Giovanelli’s paintings, these works were inherently seductive and suggestive, as they played with the idea of revealing something hidden. These images were always also about whatever might be lurking beneath the surface, like the interiors of the Renaissance — about opening the curtain, and about spectacles and events. The dynamic curves of Giovanelli’s curtains and her use of color is highly intensive and very true to life, pushing out from the canvas into the real world, as she brings her curtains alight and into the present day.

Giovanelli also aims at introducing states of the liminal in her works, evoking threshold situations whose opacity, as it is not possible to see through the curtains, prevent complete transparency and thus allow only assumptions as to what might be taking place behind those heavy swinging drapes. Her curtains fold form into color and transform color into light, which shines out and dances before our eyes in such an activated and real fashion, playing with the beholders. 

Giovanelli charges these curtains that allude to Renaissance painting with props from the present day, which themselves are also somewhat nostalgic, as they are relics of a time before Margaret Thatcher’s implementation of neoliberal capitalism and the destruction of British working class — those years in the 1980s when uprisings and strikes had the function of literally bringing together working people. 

This nostalgia is also deceptive, however, and these paintings demonstrate Giovanelli’s interest in social and cultural spaces. It was not until 2007 that women were admitted as full members in the working men’s clubs. These even had their origin in the system of the aristocracy, as the working men’s clubs were founded on the basis of a sense of class that distinguished them from the upper-class gentlemen’s clubs, while pubs were to be shielded from being overrun by the lower classes, as the function of the pub in the United Kingdom was to permit class overlaps. Thus the working men’s clubs established from the middle of the nineteenth century had a bio-political function of population control, according to which the working classes were not civilized enough to meet and drink in public. 

The decline of the working men’s clubs is symptomatic of a greater identity crisis of the British working classes, which led to them no longer voting Labour and then to them supporting Brexit in large numbers, as well as to the rapid rise of Reform UK and its leader Nigel Farage. Ironically, Reform UK is a registered company whose members may donate funds but not elect candidates. It is well known that the Brexit campaign was based on unfounded allegations and untruths, and that it led to greater state independence but certainly not to the promised reforms of the National Health Service. Instead the country saw price increases, a lack of certain goods and labor shortages, and the weakening of the UK’s economy. 

This perspective on the working men’s clubs is, however, not only nostalgic, as Giovanelli’s work is characterized by the attempt to capture and depict the fleeting nature of ecstasy, a transcendence of the self, and thus to somehow preserve this. Here too the curtains are a threshold to unreality, like the rabbit hole in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland, which represents the border between everyday life and the pleasure of expanding consciousness and allowing a liminal state to emerge — a form of escape from the humdrum that still remains part of our lives; the everyday seems otherwise so monotonous. This escape is addressed in other works by Giovanelli, as we will see in the following.