Louise Giovanelli
Always Different, Always the Same

Louise Giovanelli ‘Always Different, Always the Same’ is an artist’s book that documents an exhibition of site-specific paintings by one of the UK’s most prominent young artists. The publication takes British DJ John Peel's famous description of Manchester-band The Fall, images of the eucharist and contemporary spiritual reverie as its starting point.

With each work in Giovanelli’s series appropriated from a single 1970s film still, in which a young woman is offered bread and wine at the altar from a priest during a Catholic liturgy of the eucharist, the artist’s portraits render a striking yet unnamed cinematic moment open to evocative and provocative interpretation. Religious iconography, art history, contemporary celebrity, drug-taking, sex, personal doubling, and heightened emotional states are referenced, while a connection with reverie and revelation is strengthened by Giovanelli’s use of Entheogen as the title for each painting, a word referring to the use of psychoactive substances that induce alterations in perception for the purpose of spiritual development, having been taken from the Greek Etheos, meaning ‘having a God in one’; ‘possessed’ and ‘divine’.

If the paintings in this book show traces of a distorted hallucinatory process, then they also owe a debt to the related structure of primitive art, the medieval and those of the Proto-Renaissance before the laws of western perspective became entrenched. For example, the artist’s evocative images contain little single point perspective and refer as much to the work of Duccio, Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca as they do to recently revaluated American ‘self-taught artists’ of the interwar years, such as Morris Hirshfield, whose non-illusionistic spaces use pattern and reference the applied arts.

Although spiritual energy, sensation, art-history, repetition and difference anchor this project, Giovanelli’s recent works owe as much to her daily life in Manchester as they do her daily act of painting in the city. Currently hailing from Prestwich – the area of Greater Manchester that The Fall’s late Mark E. Smith also called home – the artist cites red brick, gothic architecture, mythic sprites, and local pubs as influences on her work, an example of which comes with the visual vocabulary of Prestwich’s The Church Inn, whose green tiles have led to the same tint in each iteration of Entheogen.

This publication follows the exhibition ‘Always Different, Always the Same’, Moon Grove, Manchester, 23 February to 16 April 2023.

Edited by Louise Giovanelli and Andrew Hunt.

Designed by Textbook Studio.

Softback, 72 pages, 23 colour illustrations, 1 b+w illustration, 150mm x 297mm.

ISBN: 978-1-910516-24-9

Artist’s book printed in a limited run of 300 copies.