III. References to Film and Music

Both Giovanelli’s interest in the curtains of the working men’s club and the title Ascents, with its connotations of ascending song, refer to music. Giovanelli is also very much inspired by film, and her works Auto-da-fé (2021), Altar (2022), and Soothsay (2023) look like snapshots taken just before something happens. Auto-da-fé and Altar depict the protagonists of Brian De Palma’s film Carrie (1976). As these titles suggest, these works address religious sentiment, and the film they are based on also explores the relationship between faith and the moral codes attached to it and, on the other hand, superhuman and telekinetic abilities that are often associated with witches.

In her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004), Silvia Federici focuses on the role of women and reproductive work in the transition to early capitalism. She argues that the emergence of capitalism was not only based on the appropriation and expropriation of land and goods, but also the expropriation of bodies, in particular bodies connoted as female, as women’s rights, sexuality, traditional medicine, and even the act of giving birth were criminalized, and a model of femininity solely on the basis of a binary relationship between man and woman was established, accompanied by other constructs such as the idea of the nation, the state, and other biopolitical projections. According to Federici, the persecution of witches was a systematic mechanism to subjugate and suppress women, and to control reproduction, and thus it was a targeted attack on the resistance of women against the implementation of capitalist structures. 

In De Palma’s horror film Carrie, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, the heroine’s mother is sexually abused and falls victim to an extreme religious mania that leads her to interpret her daughter’s growing up and the onset of her period and growth of her breasts as sinful, so that she imprisons her daughter in a pantry. As Carrie becomes more self-aware, however, she develops telekinetic abilities. She causes a boy who has insulted her to fall off his bicycle, and she manages to keep her mother at a distance. She is able to go to a dance with the school’s best-looking boy, Ross, and is elected queen of the ball. But her fellow students manipulated the election, and as she is about to be crowned, they pour a bucket of pigs’ blood over her. There is a brief moment of shock, but then the audience begins to laugh loudly, causing Carrie to use her telekinetic powers to seal off the ballroom and ignite a fire that kills nearly all of them. In Auto-da-fé Giovanelli captures precisely the moment before Carrie is covered in pigs’ blood, when she still believes she is the winner of the dance and has not yet lost her poise. Giovanelli’s allusions to Carrie are not arbitrary, as here the themes of strict faith, youth, superhuman powers, and a fascinating feminist perspective are raised within a nuanced exploration of female monstrosity within the horror genre. 

For Giovanelli painting itself is a process of research, as painting is one of the most inherently transformative media we know. The artist sees repetition as decisive, as it permits her to refine her practice. This repetition is not only evident in processes of zooming in and magnifying, which she does in order to take a closer look at specific details, but her works with curtains and her detailed studies of hair are also reminiscent of photography and film. By creating various versions, Giovanelli conjures up a sense of the uncanny, the mood of a thriller, and in every case this is a matter of a deep emotional connection to the image. Her works sometimes resemble the films of Wong Kar-Wai; his aesthetic imagery is often accompanied by an exciting soundtrack, as in his most popular movie In the Mood for Love (2000). This melancholic and poetic f ilm is an elegantly staged love story set in Hong Kong in 1962.

Giovanelli’s painting techniques are constantly evolving; she likes to experiment and sees herself very much still as a painter who is learning the art. She sometimes uses a dabbing and almost pointillist technique so that her finished pictures look like they are impregnated with slivers of light — like a gentle veil, as in Auto-da-fé. Her paintings are often decorated with glitter or include shimmering elements. Her works are frequently based on photos she takes with her smartphone. And she often f inds inspiration on Instagram, where she searches for motifs.

Painting in oil offers Giovanelli the creative potential to try out new directions, as the medium is inherently flexible and diverse. One of her principal methods is classical glazing as it was once practiced by the old masters. The canvas is first fully covered in a coat of paint that later is partially removed in order to create volume and form. This undercoat is the structural framework for the whole picture, and if it is not successful then the whole work will lack balance. In further steps transparent layers of paint are added, leading to depth, color, and texture. Both of these techniques are focused essentially on the theme of light: while glazing works with emitted light, pointillist technique uses the effects of absorbed light. 

The painterly and filmic close-ups in Latebrae (2024), Equator (2022), and Cipher (2024) show details of hair, whose intensity adds a haptic element; these works (in particular Cipher) seem almost three-dimensional. A full head of hair also stands for youth, insofar as it is not a wig, another key motif in Giovanelli’s works. She refers here to Harmony Korine’s film Spring Breakers (2012) as a source of inspiration. In this film, four young women who go to college together rob a bank to finance a trip to Florida, and they are then arrested for drug use. They are unable to pay the bail, as they have spent all the money on drugs, alcohol, and parties. These themes of youth and intoxication are central in Giovanelli’s work.