Cinzia Bevilacqua, The Canvas Taste

Diocesan Museum – Brescia

Cinzia Bevilacqua's painting is an irreplaceable way of investigating the profound structure of Being, an ontological research, that is, aimed at preserving the visual sensations, those that settle in our memory as revelation and living experience. A pictorial operation, therefore, that shuns the thought that the knowledge of reality takes place in contemplation, because the artist fuses sensations, flavours and knowledge in his paintings, love for nature and analysis of his vital rhythms, always accompanied by a absolute mastery of the trade.

Mixed with colour, light always becomes matter, a reverberation of nuances that touch velvety peaches and brilliant cherries, until it becomes a piece of high illusory and environmental decorativism in tall glass cylinders, which stack lemons, loved by Montale as “the sunshine’s gold trumpets”. 

In this long exhibition, curated by Giuseppe Fusari and Paolo Linetti, dedicated to food, the artist tells the long story of a secret search between the farmer's hand and the land, the mind and reality, the love of the history of painting of the past and detachment from the mercantile logic of the present. In each of his works there is always a certain humility and modesty, because what must be shown is cosmic harmony, the universal balance between man and nature, love for the earth, cadenced by waiting, joy and certainty of his gifts, expressed in the form of calendars of fruits and vegetables.

The attention to everyday life and to the details then extends to layouts of kitchen corners with elegant tablecloths, fruit bowls and classic vases, which express the cult of seasonality and the sacredness of food. There is no shortage of tributes to Caravaggesque baskets (Allegory of the Virgin and Allegory of Christ), while the dishes, filled with spaghetti, French fries and ketchup, accentuate contemporary eating habits. The artist, in exalting the beauty of vegetables and fruit, narrates the poetry of country life, the pleasure of the convivial moment, and thus applies a broader meaning to nourishment: a point of conjunction with all realities, from natural to spiritual, from economic to magic, in which cosmic harmony is synonymous with survival.

Giampietro Guiotto - Corriere della Sera