December 2021- February 2022
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"Reflections"
a selection of films and photographs
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CESARE BEDOGNE
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From December 12 to February 12, 2022
Exhibition curator: Jorge Cañete
Rue Haute, 36
CH - 1422 Grandson (Vaud)
open by appointment only: +41787102534 - info@jorgecanete.com
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He discovered that the real purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects. It was a method of reflection, a means of apprehending the universe and finding its place in it, and the possible aesthetic qualities that an individual canvas could offer were only the almost accidental by-product of the effort made. to engage in this quest, to get to the heart of things.
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Paul Auster (Moon Palace, trans. Christine Le Bœuf, p. 564, Thesaurus Actes Sud)
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"Reflections"
a selection of films & photographs
It was in 2009 that I organized Cesare Bedogné's first exhibition in Switzerland, in the Jullien bookstore located in the Old Town of Geneva. This exhibition of poetic and moving photographs retraced empty interiors, abandoned buildings ... From images frozen in their silence, Cesare's work has since evolved and the artist felt the need to express his sensitivity on edge. through moving images ...
The exhibition offers 2 short films: "Maria's Silence" and "The last step of an acrobat", as well as a selection of 10 images taken from these two experimental films (stills). Basically, his vision of the world and the power of these new achievements have not changed: there is this permanent surf of memory, this coming and going of the waves (to the soul), when they break against the obstacles. of life, like so many mirrors fragmenting the reflections of memory. Reflections literally and figuratively.
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Jorge Cañete
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Films presented:
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"Maria's Silence", 38 minutes (go to the trailer by cliking the image)
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This film is based on documentary material but is not, strictly speaking, a documentary film. It is not a work of fiction either. Rather, the film appeared to us as a dream, not a night dream, but a dream that unfolded day after day during the shooting. A dream shared between the photographer-director and the actress (or, better, the woman depicted in the feature film), which nevertheless seemed to follow a specific, enigmatic necessity, through which the daily shots came together almost magnetically, s 'interweaving in a pattern of superimposed layers that keep melting and dissolving into each other, in the constant flow, crystallization and reshaping of the psychic interior.
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At some point this dream seems to come to an end, but in fact it only opens up to another dream, or hallucination, where the movie itself suddenly begins to burn, releasing new and old visions - fragments of reality - until it is extinguished by a sudden storm and dissolves in a dusk of seawater. In this sense, the film is also a meditation on the elements, water and fire, wind , earth and skin, inspired by a solar eye that appeared almost on its own in one of the foregrounds and took possession of the narrative, in the endless flow and unfathomable metamorphosis of all things and all beings.
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Cesare Bedogné
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"The last step of an acrobat", 29 minutes (go to the trailer by cliking the image)
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This film appeared to us, as it unfolded almost by itself, day after day while shooting, as a mythical fairy-tale about dead sea creatures and the desire to fly - Death and Flight, that cannot exist without one another.
Like a dream, it is based on a series of interconnected visions, longings and forebodings that could not possibly be reduced to a unity of meaning. As life itself, or as the sea which is always changing and yet remains the same, unable to betray its mystery.
More like a visual poem than a narrative film, it is the story of an Equilibrist suspended on the slack rope of existence, her own territory: the thin and always changeable borderland joining all opposites, Sky and Earth, Life and Death, Light and Shadow, Elsewhere and Nowhere.
This film is also about transformation and loss of identity, about the desire to become someone else, or even something else – the screech of a seagull, bleaching bones, a broken dolphin’s mouth, dissolving into deep eternity – a meditation on Melancholy and on the frailty of existence, permeated by the secret whispering of all things shipwrecked and lost.
The last step is always the first, in my beginning is my end.
Cesare Bedogné
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Stills featured:
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The versions on sale have an A2 format (42X59,4) whose printed part is 30X50cm,
Impression: Epson HDX inks (latest generation), high resistance pigments to the light, printed on pure white paper, 100% cotton Canson Platinum Fiber RAG, 310 gsm, museum quality, printed by Marco Barsanti (marcobarsanti.it).
BIOGRAPHY :
Cesare Bedogné is an Italian photographer, filmmaker and writer. He graduated with honors in mathematics with a thesis on Minkovski's space-time, the geometric theory underlying Einstein's special theory of relativity. During his studies he also deepened his interest in the visual arts, with particular attention to film and photography, and in the early 90s he set up his first darkroom in the Netherlands, where he had joins his girlfriend Monique. At this time, he focused on his series Innerscapes, which focused on "the strange moments when the inside and the outside, the eye and the things looked at, seem to dissolve into each other". After the loss of Monique, due to leukemia (1998), he returned to Italy and began working on his series Broken Images (a quote from TSEliot) in a deserted sanatorium in the Italian Alps.
From the late 90s, his black and white prints have been exhibited, both solo and in group exhibitions, in numerous art galleries and museums around the world, such as Ch'i Contemporary in New York, Dagmar Schmidla in Cologne, the Italian Cultural Institute in Athens and the Fotomuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands. In 2009, he moved to Greece, in a remote Cretan village, where writing has also become one of his privileged means of expression. To date he has published an autobiographical novel and three collections of poems and short stories. With the images included in the photo book Of Ashes and Wind, the novel, a memory of his Dutch years until their tragic end, was the basis of his first film, Story of an Empty Theater, which he co-directed in 2015/2016 with Russian filmmaker Alexandr Balagura.
He then moved to the western end of Lesvos, where he worked on the experimental films "Maria's Silence" and "The Last Step of an Acrobat". All these works have won numerous international awards and have been screened in prestigious film festivals such as the Festival Internazionale del Cinema di Salerno, the Montecatini International Short Film Festival, the "Europe Around Europe" Film Festival in Paris, the International Festival of the Harlem Film in New York, the Istanbul Experimental Film Festival, the Illambra Film Festival in Berlin, the Cinemistica Film Festival in Granada, the Greek Film Festival in London, the New Renaissance Film Festival in Amsterdam ( where he won in 2018 the award for best experimental film with Story for an Empty Theater), the AMIWorkFest (in Vilnius, organized by Inkubatorius, where he won the award for best feature film in 2018 with Maria's Silence and the following year the award for best film with The Last Step of an Acrobat), the Concrete Dream Film Festival in Los Angeles (a festival focused on avant-garde cinema where in 2018 it won the award for best film - Philippe Mora medal - with Maria's Silence).
Cesare Bedognè currently lives in Genoa, Italy, where he founded, together with Aleksandr Balagura, Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, a festival dedicated to cinema as an art form and innovative language.
www.cesarebedogne.com
www.cesarebedogne.it
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