Cesare Bedogne

Cesare Bedognè was born in Sondrio (Italy) in 1968. He later moved to Pavia, where he graduated in Mathematics, with a Master’s Thesis on Minkowski Space-Time. During the course of his studies, he also deepened his interest for visual arts, with particular attention to cinema, and, “in the attempt of capturing the gaze in its pure state”, he devoted himself to photography, living for a considerable time in the Netherlands. He set up his first dark-room in Groningen and started working on the Innerscapes and Leaving series, concentrating on the strange moments when “interior and exterior, the eye and the things looked at, almost seem to dissolve one in another”. For the photographer the revelation of the world and of the inner self are but the same movement, they unveil in the same instant: “There may be one shot only, the necessary shot. The photograph is what remains - crystallization of psychic interior, precipitated into gelatin silver”.

Whilst Innerscapes portrays the spiritual resonance of images, the Leaving series finds its own thematic autonomy in focusing on what the author calls “the horizons of travelling”. This work deals thus with solitude, lightness and nostalgia - with the anxiety and the elation of the wanderer. The title, meant in the double sense of “departing” and “abandoning”, also alludes to that final departure which is Death.

After the loss of his Dutch girlfriend, Bedognè returned to the Italian Alps, where he started working on Broken Images in a deserted TB Sanatorium. There he recognised his “personal landscape of desolation, stilled in a frozen twilight: the mysterious bareness where the soul, alone, returns to itself”.

In the last few years the photographer also kept on working on the former series Leaving and Innerscapes, travelling in Nepal, in the US and South America.

His work is currently represented by Dagmar Schmidla Gallery in Cologne and by Ververs Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery in Amsterdam.   (Text by Venanzio Del Mare, based on interviews with the photographer)

• Silent Witness, groepstentoonstelling 25-09-2012 t/m 23-10-2010