Cesare Bedogne’ was born in 1968 in a small town in the Italian Alps. In 1987 he moved to Pavia, where he studied Mathematics, graduating cum laude with a Master thesis on Minkovski Spacetime, the geometrical theory that forms the basis of Einstein’s Special Relativity. Later on he worked as a mathematician at the Department of Philosophy of Helsinki University, at the Mitteleuropa Foundation in Bolzano and at Brunel University in London. In the course of his studies he also deepened his interest for visual arts, with particular attention to cinema, and - “attempting to capture the gaze at the pure state” - he ultimately devoted himself to photography. He took his first series of pictures while travelling in Northern Norway fascinated by the oneiric, delicately disquieting White Nights. In 1992 he joined his girlfriend Monique in the Netherlands, where he set up his first darkroom. In the meantime he began working at the Innerscapes and Leaving series, concentrating "on the rare moments when interior and exterior - looking eye and things looked at – seem to dissolve into one another”. While Innerscapes is mostly focused on the inner resonance of images, Leaving rather deals with the horizons of travelling. It deals thus with solitude, lightness and nostalgia; with the anxiety and elation of the wanderer. The title is thus meant in the double sense of “departure” and “abandonment” alluding also – in some images – to that definitive departure which is death.
The two works, however, are closely related and selections of images belonging to both series’ have been sometimes exhibited in the same space, as it recently happened at the Photo Museum of the Hague on occasion of the Empty Paradise exhibition. After the death of Monique, in 1998, Bedognè returned to Italy and started working at Broken Images in a deserted TB Asylum, using photography as a looking glass for the psyche, at the doorway of the unknown. There he recognised a personal “landscape of desolation, stilled in a frozen twilight: the mysterious bareness where the soul – alone - returns to itself”, as the photographer himself wrote in an introduction to the work. The title comes from T.Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
and alludes thus to a landscape of ruins but also to interior laceration. In Broken Images photography, again, is compenetration. In the last few years the series has been widely exhibited in Italy, in the US, in London and other European towns.
Introduction to “Broken Images” and “Innerscapes”: “The Prasomaso Sanatorium, built in an isolated place in the Italian Alps for the treatment of Tubercoloses, was deserted in the ’60 and remains completely abandoned. Moulded by rain and ice, absorbed by the vegetation, it gradually acquired an enigmatic form of existence. When I crossed its corroded threshold for the first time, as a doorway to the unknown, I recognised my landscape of desolation, stilled in a frozen twilight: the mysterious bareness where the soul, alone, returns to itself. I returned to the old hospital many times, over the years: stalking for images, brooding over the loss of a loved one, stalking for the inner self. And each time I embarked on a journey whose destination was a dilation of perception: the strange moment when interior and exterior, the seer and the sight, seem to dissolve one in another. Then there may be one shot only, the necessary shot. The photograph is what remains: crystallization of psychic interior, precipitated into gelatine silver.” |
