Louise Giovanelli

‘In the Light of False Suns’, Louise Giovanelli’s exhibition of new paintings at White Cube Mason’s Yard, revisits subjects long central to the artist’s practice – curtains, hair, female screen idols and the cinematic kiss – setting them here beneath a borrowed light. The exhibition takes its title from parhelia, or ‘false suns’, an atmospheric optical phenomenon in which sunlight refracted through ice crystals produces bright spots on either side of the sun. Illusory and dependent on the true sun, they are ‘companions of light rather than its origin’, as Giovanelli puts it. Here, the false sun becomes a figure for the seductive, artificial illumination of cinema, theatrical spectacle and religious imagery, as well as the shifting play of light upon the painted surface.