Michael Bevilacqua 迈克尔·白维拉克
Michael Bevilacqua's painting distinguishes itself and perhaps best typifies the eclectic approach to image-making and unrestrained borrowing common in contemporary painting.
Michael Bevilacqua is known for his brightly coloured, graphic paintings incorporating commercial logos, symbols and fragments drawn from the world of fashion, music, cinema, TV, advertising and contemporary art. His painterly style synthesises the language of abstraction and hard-edged figuration with the aesthetics of commercial art, while his combination of a wide range of visual references can be likened to the sampling found in music such as hip hop or electronica.
Much in the manner of a DJ in this musical genre, he has visually sampled logos from brands like Prada, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent together with images of Björk, figures from the video works of Matthew Barney, names on music groups like Mc Solaar, Kraftwerk, The Verve, and Air, characters from television series The Avengers, images of his children's toys, graffiti and Chinese calligraphy.
Michael Bevilacqua's eclecticism is exemplary of the Post-modern leveling of High and Low, the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, High culture and Mass culture. A movement that began with the emergence of Pop art. Several elements from the Sixties' youth culture (the rock music, poster art and flower children) are taken up and reworked in Bevilacqua's paintings. Noteworthy is the different method applied by Bevilacqua: contrary to Pop-art that emphasised the surface of the painting in the revolt against the classical illusion of depth, Bevilacqua's compositions are constructed by layers upon layers of meaning, adding pictorial depth to his urban landscapes or scenic cityscapes.
Where Pop art highlighted art's technical reducibility by serial production of a single artwork, Bevilacqua's paintings are meticulously 'handmade'. When painting, Bevilacqua uses a technique where each layer of colour is applied by a 'tracing-and-taping' technique, similar to the painting method of racecars. This technique gives Bevilacqua's paintings their significant graphic character inspired by his childhood fascination with racecar stickers.
With the pop expression his paintings could look like a cynical surrender to commodity culture - or maybe rather the opposite - a critique of consumer society. But his paintings are first and foremost personal passions, a kind of self-portraits or self-conscious diary notes with references to his biography and personal preferences.
Bevilacqua's paintings are comparable to a type of self-portraits or notes from a diary. Emphasised by the accumulation of signs from his cultural preferences: the type of music he listens to, drawings by his children and so forth-Bevilacqua's paintings become a type of visual biography. The cultural references of his paintings from music, film, fashion etc., are all equally part of an international metropolic youth culture. On that note, Belvilacqua's paintings are seismographs of our culture, a culture rapidly becoming increasingly entertainment based and identity-orientated than earlier. Furthermore, the paintings document a time where youth has become a period prolonged with several decades.
However, the humoristic and cultural collage of logos and quotes are simply one aspect to Michael Bevilacqua's work. The striking thing about Bevilacqua's paintings is his unique ability to compose imaginary landscapes and his way of combining colours. The vast number of patterns, stripes, grids, dotes and more or less abstract forms and figures are central to the collages. These all add to the construction of the particular cosmopolitan fantasy landscape, generating associations with the viewer. In the field of young artists inspired by pop culture, Michael Bevilacqua, stands out exactly because of his intelligent use of colour and form.
During the summer of 2005, Michael Bevilacqua was invited for a solo exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek. The exhibition was the first in the series called Louisiana Contemporary with emphasis on contemporary artists and their practices. The exhibition at Louisiana Museum was a survey of Bevilacqua works from the past decade and in some ways marked a completed era in his work, with the presence of works with strong colour compositions and their many references to Pop Culture.
Following his solo exhibition at Louisiana, new paintings were exhibited at Galleri Faurschou.
In this show it was primarily the artist's studio as focal point and inspiration for the paintings. These new works seems to a higher extent to express an artistic self-reflection. Here he uses a widened colour palette and a greater openness in the compositions.
In several of the works we are invited into Michael Bevilacqua's studio, and often it is the very basic language of painting that dominates: the studio walls, the blank canvas, the paint pots and still life objects.
In the new works, he combines his characteristic, sharp-edged and very graphic figuration with more loose brushstrokes. His works still refer to his own life and art, music and Pop Culture, but there are also affectionate references to another studio artist; the eccentric modernist painter Giorgio Morandi, who painted bottles, jars and jugs in his attic studio for almost a lifetime.
Michael Bevilacqua's reflections on painting are expressed in a very personal way when he substitutes the classic still life objects with the beautiful decorated plastic coffee cups from his local coffee shop in Brooklyn, or when his own sculptures reappear on the canvas or even when earlier works of art are made into stickers which are then used on coloured bottles and vases in the new paintings.