LONDON.- One morning in late February, inside a vast storage facility in London, painter Louise Giovanelli glanced over half a dozen of her works as they were crated up for a solo show at the White Cube gallery in Hong Kong. The outsize canvases pictured film stars with their eyes closed and their mouths open, and billowing green curtains.
The show, which coincides with Art Basel Hong Kong, is the latest milestone in the meteoric career of Giovanelli, 31, who grew up in Wales and studied art in Manchester, England, and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. After a first big break a 2019-20 solo show at the Manchester Art Gallery, one of the citys main museums she was included in a 2021 survey of contemporary painting at the Hayward Gallery in London, then joined White Cube, a leading international gallery.
Her paintings contain visual throwbacks to the gilding and draperies of Renaissance paintings yet also represent stars from films and pop culture. Mariah Careys legs were featured in a recent painting, for example.
Other paintings zoom in on Sissy Spacek (in scenes from the 1976 horror movie Carrie) and Tippi Hedren (in scenes from Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds in 1963).
This year, Giovanelli has solo shows opening at the He Art Museum in Guangdong province, China, and at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, England.
In an interview at the White Cube gallery in London, Giovanelli discussed her path to art and religions influence on her painting. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: In Monmouth, south Wales, a beautiful, picturesque and sleepy town. Not so interesting when youre a teenager, but you create your own fun.
Q: Were you artistic as a child, or good at drawing?
A: I was good at drawing, the best at drawing in my class. I used to draw pictures of Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Sid Vicious, etc. When you dont really know anything about art, the most automatic thing is to draw your heroes.
I was also trained as a pianist and a clarinetist, and there was a period in my life when I toyed with going to a music conservatoire or being part of orchestras. Then I realized that I had more of a chance at art. I thought: I can see myself as that person.
Q: Your parents were of Italian and Irish Catholic descent, and you went to church on Sundays. How did you feel about that?
A: When youre little, you just go along with it. I lost my faith pretty young, and then was quite combative. At 14, I would purposely sit in the church with a copy of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
Even though Im still an atheist, Ive come back to religion, in the sense that I think its very important. Im very interested in the aesthetic of it, and the stories and meaning behind it. I realize now that Im very steeped in it. It has affected all of my art.
Q: How did Renaissance paintings influence your art?
A: After my university degree, I was quite literally appropriating elements of Renaissance paintings. It was a device that I used to learn how to paint. Those influences are more subtle now: You can still see them, but not as direct literal quotations. Theyre embedded deep inside the psyche of the work.
Q: What about pop culture, movies and television?
A: Theres nothing now that Im interested in. Most of what Im interested in happened before I was born. Ive always felt that Ive just missed the mark whether its in music or film or television.
Q: What is it about contemporary culture that youre not drawn to?
A: Everythings too HD. You can see everything about a persons face, and it just looks too close to real life. If you see films from 20, 30 or 40 years ago, theres a mystique to them, a haziness which I really enjoy.
What Im trying to do is draw connections between the ancient and the contemporary. I wouldnt go to a Taylor Swift concert or a Mariah Carey concert. But Im trying to show the viewer: You still need this type of worship. You dont realize that you do, but these are the contemporary churches. Instagram and TikTok are a new type of shrine.
The pop stars and new icons in my paintings are the same as looking at icons in a church. I think this is why people like my work: Ive tapped into that need, the same longing that humans have always had and will always have for the higher being, the perfect being, idol worship and light and glitz and glamour.
Q: Painting is definitely back in a major way. What is its purpose and mission today in a world thats bombarded with instant photos?
A: Painting forces people to contemplate, to quite literally stop and slow down. Its not plugged in, its not a time-based thing, its not digital. Theres a need for it. Its tactile, its malleable, its able to adapt to anything thats thrown at it in any era. It stood the test of time and is stoically there, not going anywhere.
My works are about trying to tap into the idea of slow looking. There are paintings which engineer a kind of faster looking, where you can tell the artist is really trying to create a narrative. I resist that at all times. I try to be much more oblique and mysterious, and give as little information as possible.
By doing that, youre slowing people down. Thats what religion does: It forces people to slow down and look, and engage in that kind of transubstantiation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.