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
