Romeo Bevilacqua Biography
Painter, designer, decorator and ceramic technician Romeo Bevilacqua, brother of the painter and ceramist Arimondo, was born in Florence on 30 March 1908. In 1919 he moved to Albisola where he began to become familiar with clay from a very young age. At just seventeen he became artistic director of the Albisola factory "Landa" owned by the industrialist Ernesto Baccino and at the same time followed drawing courses at the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa. Between the end of the twenties and the early thirties he opened a small private studio called "Ars" in Albisola Capo. In his early twenties he began working in the Albisola ceramic factory "Fenice", owned by Manlio Trucco, of which he became artistic director from 1933 to 1936. In the second half of the 1930s, called by Tullio and Torido Mazzotti, he began his collaboration with the "MGA" and, attracted by the modernist atmosphere that could be felt in the Albisola factories at the time, he began to produce works of great personality and creativity that he exhibited, together with other futurists, at various editions of the Milan Art Triennales. For "Mazzotti" he creates works both in the traditional ancient Savona style and small ornamental plastic works, often of a caricature nature. He also creates some ceramic tile panels based on designs by Prampolini and Tato. For the "MGA" he worked for over ten years in a climate of maximum creative freedom, creating futurist ceramics and humorous and caricature works which he exhibited in a highly successful personal exhibition. In 1933 he was present with some ceramics at the I National Futurist Exhibition in Rome and at the Artisan Products Exhibition of the I Settimana Albisolese. In 1934 he participated in the First Fascist Building Plastic Mural Exhibition organized in Genoa by Fillia, Enrico Prampolini and De Filippis under the supervision of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In the years between the two wars he collaborated with the Mazzotti family's factory and, occasionally, with Adolfo Rossello's "Alba Docilia", creating works that range from futurism to traditional and ancient styles. In 1944 he returned to work on his own at "Ars". In the years following the Second War he collaborated assiduously with Giuseppe Giacchino's "IAMA" factory. In 1953 he exhibited a large amphora entitled "Last Judgment" at the Vicenza Artisan Fair, in which he depicted Leonardo da Vinci in the act of separating the reprobate artists, followers of cubism and abstractionism, from the followers of tradition. He died in Savona on 22 March 1958.
