Her present at White Dice Hong Kong, referred to as “Right here On Earth”, features a new sequence of dramatic photos that includes a dominant palette of what Giovanelli calls “sickly” inexperienced which can be each seductive and unsettling.
First, the exhibition opens with a big canvas depicting closed theatre curtains, so meticulously rendered you need to attain out and contact the material. The inexperienced curtains are tempered by a deep yellow and a pinkish-orange that resemble the reflection of stage lights on a shimmering materials. It actually units the stage for what guests are going to see afterwards.
That is certainly one of Giovanelli’s recurrent habits: to start out reveals with completely different variations of her “Curtain” sequence as dramatic introduction.
60 Picasso masterpieces to go on show at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum in March 2025
60 Picasso masterpieces to go on show at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum in March 2025
It takes the viewer throughout a threshold – on one facet, the world and all its cares. On the opposite facet, a visible storytelling journey.
The artist says she is especially desirous about revealing borders, margins and “in-between locations” via her work. This may be seen not simply in her “Curtains” but additionally within the new sequence, titled “Maenad”.
The title refers back to the feminine followers of Dionysus – the god of wine, fertility and ecstasy, also referred to as Bacchus, in historic Greek myths. These ladies, additionally referred to in Roman custom because the Bacchantes or maenads, pursued bodily and psychological ecstasy amid whole freedom.
Every of Giovanelli’s work includes a bigger portrait of a girl within the background that’s partly hid by a smaller portrait superimposed on prime.
Guests are instructed that the photographs are taken from scenes from Eighties movies during which a girl – seen with eyes closed, mouth open – is in a state of enthrallment, and it’s left to the viewer to guess whether or not it’s due to bodily pleasure, mystical abandonment or one thing else. (In truth, the photographs are all from porn movies.)
The paradox between spiritual and sexual ecstasy has been addressed by generations of artists – one instantly thinks of the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s altarpiece Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
Giovanelli says she addresses this high-quality line, too. “I’m desirous about altered states, and in worship as each possession and ecstasy.”
In truth, that “sickly” inexperienced she makes use of for the portraits comes from the inspiration of pre-Renaissance Italian painters similar to Duccio, Cimabue and Simone Martini, she says. They typically painted faces inexperienced to specific illness or sin.
Well being and salvation, the principle guarantees made by many non secular faiths, are portrayed by these historic artists as a sluggish progress from a inexperienced pores and skin tone to a extra pure one, because the characters within the portray get nearer to the divine.
Her “Maenad” work, then, speak about an in-between state amplified by having two completely different frames from the identical movie sequence showing on the identical canvas, the smaller portrait on prime of a bigger one.
For viewers, the attractive, green-hued ladies are experiencing one thing that could possibly be orgasmic or spiritual, “an altered state that we are able to’t tangibly contact”, Giovanelli says.
The dislocation of 1 portrait on prime of the opposite forces us to search for a couple of minutes longer than we’d for a single picture: we’re conscious of witnessing a second of nice intimacy, however this voyeurism is tempered by the shock of the unnatural sickly color of the ladies we stare at.
The present on the He Artwork Museum, which is a retrospective of Giovanelli’s works from the previous 5 years, offers a distinct tackle her observe. What it interrogates shouldn’t be a lot the paradox between completely different sorts of ecstasies however her exploration of the intersection between portray, drawing and the assorted influences – from Renaissance masters to popular culture – that inform her observe.
“Louise’s work have the magic of time standing nonetheless, and so they break the boundaries between time and tradition,” says Dan Qiao of Tank Shanghai, the place Giovanelli will maintain her 2025 present. “[They also offer] a powerful spirit of British underground tradition.”
This trait is clearly seen within the White Dice present, with its transgressive mixing of sacred and profane ecstasies. However that’s all Qiao will disclose of the 2025 present, with Giovanelli nonetheless engaged on the brand new work that she is going to take to Shanghai.
“Louise Giovanelli: Right here on Earth”, White Dice Hong Kong, 50 Connaught Street Central, Central, Tue-Sat, 11am-7pm. Till Could 18.
