Louise Giovanelli

Manchester Art Gallery (Manchester, UK) is temporarily home to a new body of paintings by Louise Giovanelli supplemented by her selection of three Renaissance panels, including, from the gallery collection, a crucifixion from the school of Buoninsegna di Duccio and works from Victor Man and Mark Manders.

Her practice pivots on ‘the tension between representation  and materiality, and the relationship between contemporary and historic painting.’(1) 

Actually most contemporary painting does this. It’s probably more accurate to state that Giovanelli’s modus operandi is to reassert, and, in fact, consciously maintain, the tension between the physically substantial and the elusive febrile twitchiness of contemporary images potential for fluidity, their easily unanchored transferability and temporary there-ness. 

Giovanelli also has a liking of both the physical intimacy of artisanal engagement with surface and the bullish certainties of architectural space. So Duccio's 'Transfiguration' (1307 - 11) and the aforementioned 'Crucifixion' (1315 - 30) show the time worn delicacy of a gold leaf surface and scuffed brown frame contained within a protective framing box. The religious imagery shows a clumsy but strangely sophisticated spatial hovering of figures asserting the solidity of the painting whilst alluding to the transcendent aspirations of the works. 

However, Giovanelli proceeds by highlighting the facts that, by necessity, all painting indulges a conceptual obfuscation: misting over its failure to force forms to congeal into the cohesive bulk of an object and the knowledge that the tangible can only become legible through introspection.  A process analogous to a spatial withdrawal from experiential encounter with surface qualities, a slow calibrated disconnection from haptic interface with materiality, to allow oneself to build meaning from the experience. 

So, images emerge from a surface chaos of materials but they require a physical distance before being perceived. However, they only really become productively functional when residing within or in front of their founding materials. They are contrarily tied to their material ground and present only when denying their material grounding - the images are actually present by being perceived as existing at spatially impossible points. apparently pressed into the surface and simultaneously hanging like a sheet of visual information projected onto surface.

A seductive clutter of areas of decorative repetition, wallpaper, vegetation, clothing and textile patterns infect any number of paintings, a restrained anarchy of curves and marks reminding viewers of the surface illusion of the medium itself. Giovanelli has a particular liking of the fat curves and splayed repetitions of the acanthus leaf and 'abstracts' its shapes into a number of velvet-blue and inky-blue oil paintings. The motif is present in the rich green background of a Victor Man portrait from 2015. Giovanellis use of the forms are presented like close-ups of a bunched layering of acanthus leaves; this presentation of layering as a constructive process is most effective with 'An Ex V' which has additional drawn cut marks of heavy blue, almost calligraphic in their controlled curvatures, which slice through the optical compression of layers.

Another recurrent editing or cropping of image within the artists work is the horizontal bisecting of the ovoid of the human head below the eye-line, an enforced realignment of viewers visual focus towards the mute mouth of the half portraits and their fleshy expanses of throat and neck. 

This personalised trope is employed in the bleached grainy pink-red heads of 'Billyo V' and 'Billyo VI'. Whilst previous exhibitions have seen Giovanelli using seams and edgings of lace as emphasised points of differentiation between clothing and flesh, between tones of materiality, here milky washes veil the concrete certainties of form. 

The half heads of these paintings appear to be picturings of a section of a sculpted figure prone in a sleeping position. Like 'Para' there seems to be an allusion to a digital transcriptive fixing of the solid forms, the addition of a bright narrow framing bands of colour on a number of paintings often tonally indicating the mechanical coldness of photographic media.

This editing device is also represented here with the three paintings 'Marker V', 'Marker VI' and 'Marker VII' a repeated cropped image, the top and bottom line of the cropping slightly varies giving a degree of additional information when all three are mentally overlaid to a final image. Each rendering has a subtly different degree of lightening or bleaching of the source picture and each carry a fluid horizontal line which cuts across the throat. Each rendering has a marking of two short parallel vertical lines on the neck which are hard to interpret. They are strong and rather lovely pastel coloured paintings with a suggestion of the necessary violence done when dissecting source materials.

The synthetic smoothness of the rendering of skin gives the paintings a second or even third-hand distance from the regular whorls, bruises, marks and impurities of real human skin - the paintings actually suggest quotations of, or echoes of, earlier examples of pictorial intimations of flesh. 

Giovanelli's interest in the history of the medium is slyly very much a concern with its acknowledgement and apprehension through digital media, or rather its contemporary perception as mediated through academia, images in books and the now ubiquitous digital media.

The dematerialisation of painting as tangible thing. its reduction to image-fact which has peeled away from its material grounding changes the pace of its address by the on-looker or viewer.

The 'Marker' paintings are really an additional show infiltrating the larger exhibition. They are shown on different walls but impossible not to be perceived as one work in three locations: a restaging of Giovanelli's impulse to use the architectural layout and surfaces of a display space, a recolonizing of galleries and display spaces with rectangles of painted surfaces allowing her to take back a degree of control over the pace of viewing, the speed at which a visitor can address the material fact of the component units which jigsaw into the final exhibition.

The formative context of gallery and its inseparability from the institutional action of constructing a viewing subject is being hijacked into her practice. Ostensibly a productive deathliness or constraining limbo, contrary to times movements as a thing felt,  it is strategically employed to congeal narrative flows authoritative certainties.

Giovanelli may enjoy the impenetrable fact of a paintings presence but she also recognises the rich potential of absence. 

By using the relative blankness of areas of wall, time stretches between the painted panels and any definitive 'meaning' dumbly hangs in the dead air of the vertical surfaces between the panels.

Ultimately Giovanelli likes the painting-object to operate with the same knotty compression of intentions exhibited in literature. The eloquence of anonymity, the historical function of justifying established social hierarchies with painted images; such things may be thematically present but never at the expense of a broader obsession with making clear the essentially conceptual alchemy of balancing material solidity with the feral slipperiness of imagery as meaning generators. 

1.    ‘Louise Giovanelli - In Conversation’ -  Anomie Publishing (2017)

                                      ‘Rituals Of Looking’ (pages 6 - 11)

                                             - Charlotte Keenan McDonald (page 7)

                                       Edited by Linda Pittwood and Guy Tindale

                                                        ISBN: 978 - 1 - 910221 - 13 - 6

Joe Devlin: 'Gatefolds.'

 
                             

                              

Joe Devlin’s work has historically centred on copying, transcribing or somehow reusing the stains, interventions and scribbled marginalia that borrowers have left peppering the pages of library books.

His Todmorden-based exhibition ‘Gatefolds’ is at a slight variance from his usual productive theft. Here Devlin has lifted a page of simple line drawings recording the different structural designs of farm gates, probably from a 1930s book. All twelve designs have bold no nonsense regional names: ‘Pembroke’, ‘Montgomery’, ‘Cumberland’, and so on.

Devlin’s page compiling these appropriated reductive drawings are blankly neutral presentations indicating these hinged structures; hard delineations of the operationally active which are themselves mechanical reactions to any compulsion to expressively map with the tools of drawing.

Acting as retreating markers between the mucky black sky-mirroring  puddles, the crusting cow-pats, the bumps and contours which coat rough horizontal rectangles of field and ground; the organizing frameworks of gates map the pastoral landscape.

The thick black lines framing blocks of white paper suggest drably functional pieces of landscape furniture, ones designed to either regulate, or at least to slow the pace of, independent movement But they also act as guides for the viewing eye to trace the hermetically sealed linear structures bounded by its framing horizontal oblong format.

In a further act of physical transcription the linear designs have been re-presented as small aluminium-silver freestanding, shelf-bound sculptural works. Miniature Modernist inflected rectangles with the beginnings of gentle, Origami folds dictated by the vertical and diagonal lines of the source diagrams which have then been photographed, the photographs layered in a pile in the corner of the studio. A potential book-in-waiting.

A simplistic reading of the show could assume that the territorial musings of a confused mid-Brexit UK are somehow being alluded to by an ‘appropriation’ of regional variations in directive field furniture. This is, however, an intentional comedic act of misdirection. 

The real substance of the exercise is both much simpler and considerably more complex. The literalness of the lurching moments of transcription folds back on themselves, from deformation of the authority of the original taxonomy of regional gates to their productive reimaginings as ‘art-objects’ which then, via photography, head back to the flat universe of images and their inevitable supporting text.

Even if they detour through rigid and legible formal structurings - the written word, sculptures shapes and depths, photography’s ‘indexicality’ and digital shiftiness - the meandering and interweaving functions of author, reader, viewer and producer are the actual constants. The assumed authority of an  originating authorship is the slyly targeted centre of the artist’s criticism, even if this includes undermining the primary importance of artists themselves in the whole interpretive game.

Chester Tenneson: 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything'.

In Salford's Paradise Works, Chester Tenneson's exhibition 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything' mixes sculptures formed from collisions of accrued kitsch objects with examples of the more widely exhibited text and signage pieces. 

Titles seem to be lifted from literature and the lyrics of pop songs; all in the service of mining popular culture to construct physical incarnations of moments of poetic sarcasm.

Tenneson has a preference for the high-fidelity banality of functional objects with a plasticised shouty-ness, everyday things as heightened visual events nodding towards the distancing paradigm of digital purity. They are objects that aspire to the cheeky inconsequentiality of flat and decorative signage.

The largest pieces are floor-bound combinations of functional items and cartoony toy items echoing blandly useful things. So 'Out Here On The Mountain Top' (2018) is a square art packing case topped by a miniature but not insubstantial black umbrella, open and, impossibly, standing up by the curved handle resting on the wooden surface. 'You're Like An Automatic" (2019) has a handful of wavy plastic chips spooning each other in the curved indentation of a polystyrene brick's surface. 'More, More, More' (2018) uses three trainers as snug bases for three fatly inflated inflatable walking sticks; their curving handles grumpily facing away from each other. 

The best of these works is 'The Victory Cry' (2019); a table tennis net raised from the ground at each end of its length by aluminium-silver cleaning stanchions, its horizontal sag emphasized by a weighting square of sticking plaster. It sulkily radiates the prosaic inevitability of a predictable British Wimbledon defeat.

The smaller sculptural collisions presented on a line of white shelves are more immediately like-able but stick in the grey matter less successfully. The exception being 'Ashes to Ashes' (2018) in which a lumpy ash grey arch of an aquarium rock and a horizontal plastic cigarette bring to mind a pissed golem on a fag break.

Tenneson's confident use of the volume of real space has been ratcheted up further by hijacking Paradise Works projection and digital image playback space as an almost blacked out installation. A short line of cinema seats face a floor grounded light-box announcing 'A PAUSE', the restful break time from opening night socialising undercut by the regular sonic irritant of a clacking metronome.

Even here the space of the room is formally restructured as a series of flat theatrical layerings and positionings of viewer and information-object.

Cognisant of the retreating vagueness of object-biased culture Tenneson seems to enjoy taking pre-fabricated things for a wander back into the arena of flattened signs; that is to say literal, functional popular signage. This adds a tragicomic incorrectness to proceedings and yet, far from nonsense, the works themselves radiate an ironclad logic; one which is, however, hard to re-articulate outside the idiot slap of the visual.  

The flatter text on board paintings of 'HALF OF TWO DAYS OF EVERYTHING' (2019) and fourteen part 'Birds never look into the sun (Social media paintings)' (2018 - 19) have the visual punch of informational signs. Blocky text sits on simple decorative grounds, avoiding the diaphanous layerings of obsessively painterly engagements with surface, and transcribe the spatial grandeur of the more bombastic of Ed Ruscha's horizon-hugging signage into claustrophobic square patternings like polite slices of wallpaper design. 

'ALLEGORICAL NUDES' announces a dark blue acrylic and gouache; 'PHOTOGRAPHED AT LEAST ONCE    IF NOT TWICE' darkening blue letters observe seated on a washy pink background; 'BOB' has the eponymous Bob (or possibly an insinuated verb 'Bob') as text on a scruffy skyblue hovering over a white strip of horizon; keeping it simple 'TUPPERWARE IN HER APARTMENT' states a blank white square of canvas board - and so, inventively, on and on goes the pithy little text works. All enjoyably slightly left-field and smile inducing.

The pivotal piece is the most easily overlooked one, 'Entre tes reins (Unknown Meeting)' (2017) already handily 'meta' with its description of 'painting-drawing printed onto vinyl, on vinyl.'  A small portrait format rectangle of yellow vinyl stuck directly on the wall, each corner infected by a thumb print scale, slightly raised simulation of blue tack. 

It places the viewer on the wrong side of a hastily produced office notice, combines the functional, banal and eye-catching with a spatially impossible vantage point, and in the process reanimates the attenuated confabulations of the neighbouring sculptures; enforcing an unanchored solidity to them. One which then loops back to the interleaving two-dimensional simplicity of the text work.