by Giuseppe Fusari
Cinzia Bevilacqua is not a realistic painter, she is, rather, a figurative one and this encompasses the whole way she has of intending both art and its purpose. She is not a realist in that she will not feign the locking of her subjects into an instant vision; she will rather showcase her choice of the subject and its pose so that the first act of her painting is not as yet the intellectualistic act of thinking the subject and neither is it the subsequent act of fixing the subject on canvas but, the mere and very concrete act of putting a subject into a pose so that it becomes part of a very precise event that is articulated – like the parts of a sentence – and is arranged according to criteria of importance that only the artist, being the arranger thereof, can allow himself to determine. In this sense it is the structure – one step before the subject – that constitutes the primary coming together of the purpose of that very same work of art, and it is the structure that can take on the responsibility of bequeathing objects with superior purpose or, with a symbolic meaning that doesn’t require anything different to reality, thus making the traces of reality disseminate over the canvas, into records in which the artistic experience is inscribed. There are two lemons – for example – that have us referring back to Cezanne for the subtlety with which they are investigated, virtually nullified, rendered immaterial yet, still left to maintain all the physicity necessary to a portrait. Two lemons in pose on a table, flooded with light on the one side (although the side is not easy to capture due to the way in which the substance of the lemons is invaded and sublimed by light) and then the background, blue or green, nearly indefinable, settling over as though it were not actually the background but – instead – a veil, that had been covering the lemons prior to their pictorial recreation. Everything here, though, becomes essentially crushed, friable, even molten into the lumps of a substance that is no longer compact – as in other works by Cinzia Bevilacqua – yet quivering, rhabdomantic, as though what one seeks is below, immediately beneath the ordinary of what is selected as the protagonist of portrayal. They are two lemons in pose and they could just as well be two small yellow birds, or two girls wearing a short dress that have just come outdoors on a nice sunny morning. A number of years ago Cinzia painted some such figures suffused with light and colours oozing from the canvases which were still too compact, concentrated on detail. Here instead with the lemons and, as in other still life works, there is a prevailing strength of pictorial signage – although it does have us somewhat regretting the Casorati-like echoes of the marvellous composition dated ’98 called Natura morta con bottiglia (Still Life with Bottle), all a-linger on well-turned volumes and fine definition of objects – a signage asserting itself with a force that is so imperious that the objects are transfigured, their very essence transfixed so that they are brought back to our eyes accustomed to forgetting the everyday, as if they were new, deprived of too hurried an encounter (that of consumption), cocooned within a space – made of silence – substantiated by the time necessary for the contemplation of the factual depiction and for them to be recreated by that same work. And just as in the past when the still life works added a cryptic, theologically superior purpose to the beauty of depiction, a very subtle thread of implied references is hidden in the balancing that Cinzia subjects her natural forms to, a thread that is nurtured by deferments to something else that is not - in this case – a theological haughtiness, but a difference that builds back the relationships amongst things (comprising those not represented) through the simplification of forms, to which colour grants a semblance of the everyday. Such interspacing comes about thanks to the nonentity of the selected subject that will not assert itself – by its own nature – as important; which is why recreation becomes essential and cannot be photographic but rather a patient deconstruction (or decomposition) of shape through the mobility of pictorial strokes aimed at reflecting back the sense of that form and not its simple factuality. And then the veil (the veil you have the feeling is floating above the lemons and, in other parts, seems to assume the finely dusty consistence, vibrantly so, of indistinct distancing), the background that serves, once again, to unveil the shape of objects by granting them a semblance of consistency, without being bound to the build up of a perspective frame in which to set subjects that are all the more demanding, higher-bound and solemn...