by Roberto Armenia
[…] Annigoni as a source of inspiration for Cinzia Bevilacqua, young painter (she’s 40 years old) from Brescia (Italy), making a name for herself with her portraits and her splendid, captivating and poetic still life works. After having attended the Vincenzo Foppa School of arts in Brescia, Bevilacqua moved to Florence where she attended the courses in Painting at the Academy of fine Arts held by Goffredo Trovatelli (one of the magic, last-century Teachers of Art, still alive and, at 90 years old, still a grand and fascinating artist and maieutic), she met and associated with Annigoni, who was charmed by the young painter and took her under his wing, enriching her work with precious advice and suggestions. Bevilacqua is an eclectic and versatile painter, privileging portraits, still life and en plain air landscapes using an easel similarly to the impressionists, in which, based on inspirations to the Renaissance, landscapes take on full thematic autonomy. Her still life work, as in the times of Frederic II of Sicily (his court loved and also favoured portraits) is a poetic reconstruction, a sublimation of nature as observed by eyes that are careful to discover and sublime the harmony innate to nature, in all objects observed and depicted. Instead of finding inspiration in Annibale Carracci and his allegoric nature, or in the fantasies of Arcimboldi or yet again, in the great Caravaggio (perhaps the first to loudly proclaim the quality and artistic dignity of still life “so much doing to manufacture, to produce a painting that is as good of flowers, as of figures” he wrote), she is instead inspired by the poetry and creative liberty of one of the masters of our time, Giorgio Morandi. Her still life works, as do her landscapes, represent the triumph of intimism, of poetry within art where external reality, objects, are recreated through the sensibility and culture, the imaginative reinventions of a young paintress hailing from Lombardy, the very same that, as Luciano Spiazzi underlines – “started expressing herself with a pencil and a few colours when she was barely adolescent and all the rest was simply an in-depth, serious and regular investigation of her need to affirm herself through figurative artwork”. […] What also needs to be underlined here is a long standing and happy relationship, regularly renewed year in year out, between art related to faith and the Christian message. Just as the Catacomb paintings had the task of educating the first Christians to the recognition of beauty, they also simultaneously educated them, the great majority of which did not know how to read, by putting across the values and dogmas of the Catholic faith; in about the same way Cinzia Bevilacqua takes part in decorating the nowaday venues of worship, thereby participating in the diffusion of the Christian message and great protagonists of Christian faith […] One of the salient features of this young and interesting painter is her interest in and her extreme care and dedication to research, to the study of pictorial techniques and artistic and communicational expressions. She studied and perfected her work with masters such as Trovarelli and Annigoni, just as, for the decoration of the stained glass panels in the Gombio Church, she studied the “émail tubé, technique; for her homage to Cimabue, Rembrandt and Pontormo she studied and implemented their very same techniques whilst for the icons selected at the IV “Moretto” prize by the Brescia Municipality Council, she studied and implemented the methods used by the icon making masters. […] As to Cinzia Bevilacqua, we can in fact quote one of the most suggestive verses by a grand poet, Father David Maria Turoldo (who worked for a good number of years in the Paintress’s home area and that she met, got acquainted with and loved): “light baring bodies / light scattering shadows / light cutting though you from side to side''. Portraits by Cinzia Bevilacqua are in fact dominated by light, by transparencies that enhance the sweetness of emotion, the nobility and dignity of the faces and bodies depicted and by the casualness and poetry that surrounds and sublimes, virtually idealising, the subjects portrayed.