An Artist’s Quasi-Exploration of Celebrity Culture

LONDON — The title of Louise Giovanelli’s first exhibition at White Dice in London — As If, Nearly — is a literal translation of the Latin phrase quasi, which implies that one factor resembles one other, however not completely. Bringing collectively latest works of various codecs, the exhibition continues Giovanelli’s inquiry into celeb and devotion. She means that our largely secular society imbues celebrities with a number of the sacred traits beforehand reserved for spiritual figures and artifacts. Via formal, thematic, and narrative selections, she situates her quietly seductive work in a dreamlike, in-between state, one which alternately references the digital and the historic, the non secular and the ephemeral.  

Two work from Giovanelli’s collection of drawn curtains body the exhibition. The massive, yellow-green triptych “Prairie” (2020) relies on a snapshot of the artist’s personal curtains, which she flipped, copied, and pasted, till the home drapes took on an operatic scale. Much less formal however simply as dramatic, the fringed metallic curtains of “Vanitas” (2022) evoke the retro levels of seedy bars. Surrounding these two work are works depicting a shimmery gown worn by Mariah Carey, a monk misplaced in prayer, shiny blond hair, and the tv character Patsy Stone from the Nineteen Nineties sitcom Completely Fabulous, smiling mischievously by way of an empty wine glass. The curtains of “Prairie” and “Vanitas” are each closed, as if a efficiency has simply completed, or is about to start.  

Giovanelli bases every portray on a picture from her private archive, which incorporates movie stills, staged pictures, iPhone snapshots, and particulars of non secular work. Whereas her supply materials ranges from the fifteenth century to the current day, she attracts her method from Northern Renaissance painters. She primes her canvases with gesso, then painstakingly applies skinny layers of extremely pigmented paint, which typically consists of gold leaf. The luminous impact remembers stained glass home windows, or the blue gentle emanating from a digital display. Equally, the elongated rectangular format of a number of works gestures towards each the proportions of smartphones and devotional work of saints. 

“I’m at all times striving for narrative ambiguity in my work,” Giovanelli informed Juxtapoz in 2020. She achieves this ambiguity in numerous methods. “Silo” (2020) is so tightly targeted on a coiled strand of hair that we don’t see who it belongs to. “Altar” (2020) achieves its ambiguity not by way of composition however thought its depiction of a shifting emotional state. Primarily based on the 1976 cult horror movie Carrie, the work captures the precise second the namesake character transforms from promenade queen to a demonic embodiment of that stereotype, as she realizes that her coronation was an elaborate prank. 

Questioning how artwork, faith, and in style leisure every create people and pictures worthy of devotion, Giovanelli doesn’t present any easy solutions, however quite highlights the place these spheres blur, turning into extra like each other. 

Louise Giovanelli: As If, Nearly continues at White Dice Bermondsey (144 – 152 Bermondsey Road, London, England) by way of September 11. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.