“In many of my works […] there is a persistent temporal feeling. The feeling that one has just missed or is just about to perceive an action taking place.”
—Louise Giovanelli
In Peeping Tom, we are shown an intimate, close-cropped vision of a woman, reclining with her head back and eyes closed. At first appearing to be relaxing, or even asleep, like so many of Manchester-based artist Louise Giovanelli’s works, there is a darker subplot lurking beneath the surface of her beautifully luminous paintings. In fact, we see a depiction of the character Helen Stephens, in a still taken from Michael Powell’s 1960 cult horror Peeping Tom. In this moment, Stephens – played by British actress Anna Massey – is seen closing her eyes in an act of defiance as she is held at knifepoint by crazed serial killer Mark Lewis – played by Carl Boehm. Giovanelli renders this portrait in lustrously warm tones of pink, red and brown, creating a disarmingly warm and inviting atmosphere for us to assume the role of voyeur.
Giovanelli is known for her innovative compositions, often distorting everyday objects, and affording them surreal and otherworldly connotations. In the present work, the composition is intrinsically linked to both the title and source material; the viewer becomes the titular ‘Peeping Tom’, accessing an intimate view of a woman who is unaware of our presence. As her head reclines, a long, pale expanse of neck is exposed to the viewer; usually a sign of a more sensual expression of pleasure, this renders the painted subject all the more discordant with both the source material and the implications of the work’s title. Giovanelli’s decision to choose this frame, where Stephens looks to be feeling pleasure rather than fear in the face of death, is typical of her expert ability to distort meaning and create unsettling atmospheres. Whilst much of Giovanelli’s work is figurative, ‘Painting a sitter, for example, would never cross my mind’. Instead, she pulls from contemporary media and culture, using familiar faces as her inspiration, yet frequently depicting them in unrecognisable ways.
Represented by White Cube and GRIMM, Louise Giovanelli has recently held solo exhibitions from February to June this year in New York and Manchester and has been announced as the recipient of a solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2024. Giovanelli’s work is held internationally in prestigious institutions such as Tate, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the National Museum of Oslo, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Hort Family Collection, New York; and The Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo.
