Louise Giovanelli: A Song of Ascents

The Manchester-based painter’s first institutional show lifts the curtain on altered states, sensuous drapery and ecstatic pleasure

Louise Giovanelli: A Song of Ascents, installation view, The Hepworth Wakefield, 23 November 2024 – 21 April 2025. Photo: Michael Pollard, courtesy The Hepworth Wakefield.

The Hepworth Wakefield
23 November 2024 – 21 April 2025

by JOE LLOYD

Louise Giovanelli (b1993) invites us to consider the curtain. Her painting Stoa (2024), which spans two canvases, depicts a shimmering green set, topped by a canopy. There is a hint of pink near where the curtain trails the floor: is the emerald colour the result of stage lights? The painting is named for a type of Ancient Greek enclosed walkway erected to protect people from the elements, and perhaps the curtain announces a sort of refuge. Giovanelli often paints curtains encountered in working men’s clubs across Britain, themselves places of sanctuary from the outside world – albeit ones reserved for a long time for white men.

The curtain in Stoa is glamorous, even opulent; yet it is also gaudy and tawdry, a bit of wishful thinking – can a sheet of fabric transform a mundane room of well-worn carpets and greying ceiling tiles into the site of a transformative spectacle? Domestic curtains are used to block light and create privacy, and theatrical curtains to conceal the set between acts. But this curtain projects from nothing and might never be opened. Is this a scene of anticipation, as we wait for the curtain to open and the night’s entertainment to commence? Or has the show come to an end, merriment drawn to a close, the performance already a gradually fading memory.

Louise Giovanelli, Altar, 2022. © DACS, 2024 Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. Photo © White Cube (David Westwood).

Stoa is one of several curtain paintings in A Song of Ascents, Giovanelli’s first institutional solo exhibition. Some of them stretch luxurious across several panels. The lustrous Scala (2024), purple but shot with green and pink, has crosshatched strips of light across it; the silvery Decades (2024) glitters as if adorned with stars, a spotlight creating a galaxy amid this cosmos. There is another green one called Dado (2024), smaller, with a gauzy maroon layer atop the green suggesting a velveteen textile and speckles of actual glitter. In painting curtains, Giovanelli turns a background feature of early modern art into the main event. 

Giovanelli’s work, like that of many painters today, is saturated with the history of painting. Her early work saw her appropriate from Renaissance paintings, but now the references seem less visual borrowings and more a sense of spirit. Her interest in curtains and drapery extends to hair, and some of the most satisfying works here meticulously capture flowing locks from behind, shorn from the head that holds them. In the vein of the baroque, Giovanelli turns flesh-and-blood reality into something sheeny, dramatic, charged. Like Bernini before her, she often captures a moment of ecstasy or transfiguration, a passing between states. A Song of Ascents takes its name from a section of the psalms that begins: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains.” Giovanelli links this passage to the achieving of an elevated state of consciousness.

Louise Giovanelli, Wager, 2021. Oil on canvas, diptych, 120 x 160 cm (47 1/4 x 62 in) each. © DACS, 2024 Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London.

The curtain provides a ground for this shift. “Curtains change people’s behaviour, even in modest spaces,” Giovanelli says in the exhibition catalogue. “In working men’s clubs, for instance, the tiny stages with little curtains make people feel like they should perform. It’s fascinating how a curtain can give people the green light to be someone they’re not in daily life.” Alcohol is another. The Painting’s Landlady (2024) depicts “drinking artist” Helenskià Collett proffering a glass to the viewer. We see her blurred a little through the vessel, her crimson lips floating like a hallucination, inducing you to find the mystery at the bottom of the glass.

Louise Giovanelli, Entheogen, 2023. Oil on linen, 180 x 90 cm (70 7/8 x 35 3/8 in). © DACS, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michael Pollard.

Other works capture the ecstatic moments themselves. Mise en Scène (2023) features half the head of a woman thrown back as if dancing in a club, her mouth agape with joy. Her face is yellow as if under the glow of lights, its texture blurred into a tenuous fuzz. The outline side of the face looks as if it could dissolve into liquid. Entheogen (2023) is named for the Ancient Greek éntheos, meaning inspired or possessed by the gods. It features the entire head of a woman in a similar moment of open-mouthed awe, on a field of linen with the dimensions of the side panels on an altarpiece. Painting on paper Soothsay (2023) offers a zoomed-in view of this maw alone, both the entrepot for many of the things that can provoke ecstatic moments – alcohol, pills, tongues – and a part of the body that reveals our lack of complete control over ourselves, being prone to spill open unbidden.

Louise Giovanelli, Auto-da-Fé, 2021. Oil on canvas, 41 x 25.5 cm (16 1/8 x 10 1/8 in). © DACS, 2024 Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London.

Giovanelli’s spots of happiness can be deceptive. Auto-da-Fé (2021) and Altar (2022), presented together, show first the scene from Brian de Palma’s 1976 film Carrie when the heroine is declared Prom Queen and then the moment that she is doused in pig’s blood. A jolt of unexpected happiness is almost immediately punctured by horror and humiliation. The glitter of the prom is reflected in the slick spill of gore, connecting Carrie’s fallen state to the fantasy she enjoyed just before. Altar is narrower than Auto-da-Fé, as if Carrie’s world has contracted and diminished, placing her on a one-way track to oblivion.

There are other doublings throughout the exhibition, in part because Giovanelli paints multiple versions of each subject, as if a photographer keening for the perfect shot. Two paintings named Harmony (2024) depict a kiss from a Harmony Korine film. Both are cropped, fixating on the mouths and the sides of the face alone, though they cut a slightly different section of the film screen. One of them has a near-photorealism. Giovanelli is particularly good here at capturing light on skin, and the dappling of flesh seen closeup. The other is softer, dreamier, as if the kiss has subtly removed the lovers from the normal passage of time. For all the oddness of Giovanelli’s images – the closeup mouths, the slick blood, the curtain without a performer – there is romance in their heart.