Cl茅ment Cogitore: Notturni
French artist and filmmaker Cl茅ment Cogitore treads the boundaries between cinema and contemporary art, video, installation and photography, staging his complex and innovative devices.
For the first time in Italy, the exhibition Notturni presents a selection of Cogitore鈥檚 most notable videos, in which he explores the contradictions and ambiguities of contemporary images in a juxtaposition of truth and falsehood, direct accounts and ready-made film images, calling into question our perception of the real and of history.
Cogitore鈥檚 works are made up of a variety of visual elements, non-linear narrative forms mid-way between documentary and fiction that never configure themselves as a single representational form, in which fiction itself becomes a kind of 鈥渢heatre鈥� of reality. As Orson Welles quoted from Picasso in his celebration of mystification in F for Fake, 鈥渁rt is a lie that makes us realise the truth鈥�.
Night occupies a central role in these tales, evocative of all that is unknown, irrational 鈥� dreams, darkness, the Northern Lights, chiaroscuro moods punctuated by artificial lighting. The interplay between shadow and light is emblematic of the antinomy of existence itself: good and evil, night and day, mortality and immortality, visible and invisible. Cogitore is attracted to archetypes, to models, elements of an alphabet of archaic and powerful images that are both modern and poignant, charged with a strong symbolism precisely because they reconnect human beings with their most authentic and ancestral nature.
The sacred and the figuration of rituals are two central themes in Cogitore鈥檚 work. He regards the sacred as an ancestral sentiment which concerns the mystery of human existence and to which he attempts to provide an answer. He does not replace existing dogma with his own, however. Rather, he offers a poetic representation that combines spirituality with elements from everyday life. His visual language takes its cue from the films of Robert Bresson, whom he describes as being the 鈥渁bsolute master of the sacralisation of inglorious everyday existence鈥�.
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French artist and filmmaker Cl茅ment Cogitore treads the boundaries between cinema and contemporary art, video, installation and photography, staging his complex and innovative devices.
For the first time in Italy, the exhibition Notturni presents a selection of Cogitore鈥檚 most notable videos, in which he explores the contradictions and ambiguities of contemporary images in a juxtaposition of truth and falsehood, direct accounts and ready-made film images, calling into question our perception of the real and of history.
Cogitore鈥檚 works are made up of a variety of visual elements, non-linear narrative forms mid-way between documentary and fiction that never configure themselves as a single representational form, in which fiction itself becomes a kind of 鈥渢heatre鈥� of reality. As Orson Welles quoted from Picasso in his celebration of mystification in F for Fake, 鈥渁rt is a lie that makes us realise the truth鈥�.
Night occupies a central role in these tales, evocative of all that is unknown, irrational 鈥� dreams, darkness, the Northern Lights, chiaroscuro moods punctuated by artificial lighting. The interplay between shadow and light is emblematic of the antinomy of existence itself: good and evil, night and day, mortality and immortality, visible and invisible. Cogitore is attracted to archetypes, to models, elements of an alphabet of archaic and powerful images that are both modern and poignant, charged with a strong symbolism precisely because they reconnect human beings with their most authentic and ancestral nature.
The sacred and the figuration of rituals are two central themes in Cogitore鈥檚 work. He regards the sacred as an ancestral sentiment which concerns the mystery of human existence and to which he attempts to provide an answer. He does not replace existing dogma with his own, however. Rather, he offers a poetic representation that combines spirituality with elements from everyday life. His visual language takes its cue from the films of Robert Bresson, whom he describes as being the 鈥渁bsolute master of the sacralisation of inglorious everyday existence鈥�.
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