by Vittorio Sgarbi
Cinzia Bevilacqua hails from that very same nineteenth century tradition that had also been taken as a reference point by the artists of the Twenties and Thirties of the just bygone century that had not accepted the futuristic storm but had endeavoured by all means to preserve the quality of traditional painting. Likewise to these other brave and generous colleagues of hers, this Paintress of unquestionable class has us once again recalling the importance of figures and, of still life. Very much alive and cast within a halo of melancholy, her works consider the objects and figures they portray as something objective yet simultaneously marked with a restless sense of non-belonging to the ordinary everyday. In her works on human figures, Bevilacqua appears to act not only on capturing the humanity but the very soul of the subject portrayed, thereby tending to give her quest a sense that is everything but impressionistic, constructing a sort of psychological and revealing vision. Her expressivities furthermore go on to create non perspective contours as though composing a parallel score with a counterpoint musical function. Feeling the need to access what can rightly be held as being the formal values of portrayal, the artist plays on solid definition of individual features with a synthesis of illustrative wealth. Her expressive traits thus accomplish themselves in an anecdotic and simplifying depiction that will not give way to doubts or allusions and, mainly where her still life works are concerned, they underline the purport of her vision, artfully rendered by means of eloquent and essentially representative strokes. Her portrayals work beyond emotion and extract their very own beauty through objective and solidly plastic displays. The pictorial substance rightfully implements an overall creative veiling that comes across in the vigour of the painting backgrounds and in the fusion of the glazing. Forcefully impressing each theme and thanks to a knowledgeable management of her pictorial and signal rendering potential, Bevilacqua accomplishes a variety of different events and for each one of them, provides narrative solutions respondent to pre-set requirements. Her canvases also have us recall the dominant feature of family portraits; here the affective quality of intent is measured against the objectivity of accomplishment whereby the solution of technical difficulties will not bow to compromises possibly imposed by heartfelt issues. After all, in her still life works she deals with the conceptuality of the settings with that very same intensity that tends to solidify objects metaphysically and to fill the areas surrounding them with a plasticity within which they can actually find a reason to just be. This Paintress experiences her pictorial self by delving into the immanence of the objects and individuals that are part of her world, acknowledging them as the centre of that world, accepting them to be all that they concretely are and then rendering an intact depiction of their significant essence. Following the tradition of the masters afore, this artist is a narrator amidst these events where tonal quality defines the perception of what is visible. The expansion of a luminosity held within cuts back any psychological distances between the portrayed and the observer and altogether avoids queries with a gist of existentialism. The constructive revelation of colour forms an indissoluble tie with the geometric definition of the shapes, in a sort of illustrative bond donning substance to both the figure as well as the space it is set into. Finally, as to the visual impact of the works by Bevilacqua, it can by all means be said that they assert themselves with the authoritativeness of a lesson in style. Taken from the volume: ''Le scelte di Sgarbi'' (Selections, by Sgarbi), Editor: Giorgio Mondadori.