Issue 9, Profiles

Louise Giovanelli

Trojan Horse

Words PHIN JENNINGS

Photography TOBY COULSON

It’s difficult to describe the feeling that Louise Giovanelli’s work engenders. Call it a devotional state or a religious experience; there is something about her paintings – saturated and shimmering images, ambiguous in both tone and subject – that calls for slow and reverent looking. “I’m not saying that to blow my own horn, but it is interesting: people get religious in front of certain paintings. The work really speaks to them,” she tells me.

This is no accident. In a series of conversations with Giovanelli, I learn that every aspect of each painting is carefully calibrated to draw the viewer into it, holding us for long enough to stealthily impart a flickering impression of its darker side.

“Still Moving,” Giovanelli’s recent exhibition at Grimm Gallery in New York, borrowed imagery from a number of films. Mea Domina (2025) is a double portrait of Christina Ricci in the 1998 film Buffalo ‘66 (1998). A little over eight feet tall, it’s target-like in composition, with one image nested within another. Instead of drawing the viewer’s eye from left to right, this configuration encourages it to skirt the painting’s edge – an emerald painted eyelid and a shock of straw-coloured hair – before falling into its central portrait. At the very center of the canvas, a fleck of white light is reflected on Ricci’s lower lip. A detail like this might usually be quickly passed over. Here, it’s a transfixing focal point: the eye of a painting that swirls around it.

“It slows you down and it sucks you in,” she explains of the orbital structure that she has adopted for Mea Domina and a handful of other recent paintings. She’s been experimenting with it, inspired by the use of split-screen in film, in service of the kind of slow, devotional looking that all of her work aspires to.

Born to an Irish and Italian Catholic family, Giovanelli knows that religion is about more than belief. It’s about a community finding a common object of devotion to congregate around. Raised in the church, she spent her rebellious teenage years resisting the trappings of faith. In time, she found her rejection softening. Eventually, it morphed into a deep respect for religion paired with the feeling that its engine – an irresistible desire to worship to something greater than ourselves – is an essential aspect of being human. “We’re aspirational,” she says. “We need to look up to something.”

Today, she lives and works in Manchester, many miles from the Welsh border town where she first experienced these moments of intense shared reverence in the church. In daily metropolitan life, religious devotion is quite rare, but the human aspiration that she talks about hasn’t disappeared. She sees it everywhere. “It’s no wonder that people still want to go to the theatre, cinema, pop concerts, even just watch television,” she explains, “people don’t go to church but they still have this yearning to point to something higher than themselves.”

Many artists appropriate religious imagery in their work, where rosaries, crucifixes and prayer books become relics of a bygone time. Giovanelli prefers to show us the secular subjects that inspire devotion today. She has painted the landlady of her local bar, closely-cropped torsos in sequin dresses and characters from various films experiencing something between divine pleasure and abject terror. At her hand, each one is elevated to the status of an idol. They have the shimmering, shuddering quality of an object spotted in the distance on a hot day – a mirage, perhaps – both indefinite and undeniably clear.