“Ambiguities arise when a detail is effective in more than one way at once,” wrote William Empson in his seminal work of literary criticism. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The cryptic narrative details of Louise Giovanelli’s work are full of loose, lax meaning. In each of her five cinematic canvases hung in the Georgian-style rooms of Moon Grove, we see the same face of an anonymous young woman beset by seduction, religion or hallucination: is she performing a sacred ritual or is she taking psychoactive pills?
Giovanelli’s source material is the bizarre world of film and media that surrounds us and gurgles in our living rooms. Up close, his portrayals of celebrities lose all resemblance to the actors and break down into mottled blotches and pointillist brushstrokes, the paraphernalia of illusionism. The eyes do a lot of work in these paintings, drooping back into their sockets, with the whites appearing at the edges. The artist invests the portraits with great drama, evoking a strange feeling of suspense. The viewer is led to imagine what might happen next, or what might have happened before, without being able to define the vaguely troubled emotional flavor of the present moment. Time and time again, she presents us with the same ethereal scene, one that would otherwise disappear into the fleeting temporality of a cult film.
Many influences are claimed, but mostly for formal purposes. Their garish neon green haze riffs on Munch’s The sick child1885-1886, while the tight cropping echoes images from cult films of the 1970s. Trecento master Duccio, for example, may have left his mark with bright atmospheric effects and verdaccio dyed, but Giovanelli’s canvases, striking in their simplicity, nod to a more ecstatic, and perhaps sinful, mode of worship. His work offers a form of escape, a certain equivocation. Such is the strange and transsubstantial power of Giovanelli’s paintings, between revelation and intoxication, between sacred and profane.
