ART EXHIBITIONS
MANUELE CECCONELLO
"LANDS AND WATERFALL . ROOTS AND DREAMS"
The exhibition of Manuele Cecconello's "photographic works" will take shape as an "exhibition within the exhibition", as a parallel track completely intertwined with the exhibition itinerary of the pictorial works and sculptures of his father Gastone Cecconello.
The friendship that has accompanied the entire existence of the lives of Angelo Gilardino and Gastone Cecconello has undoubtedly contributed to inspire Manuele's artistic research, his sensitivity and his talent.
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Manuele Cecconello's photographs do not set themselves the primary objective of capturing images of the territory of great quality, beauty, technical expression and intuition...
Manuele Cecconello's shots seem to spring from the desire to steal from every subject, whether it be landscapes, people or things, that vital, dramatic or poetic vibration that makes it feel the "sound of the soul".
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And in this way depictions of a timeless time appear, of spaces cluttered by sensations hidden among the things portrayed, of branches that know how to evoke the sound of the wind that is caressing them.
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Manuele Cecconello is a talented and high quality director. Together with Marco Tullio Giordana he made a long series of documentaries that tell the life of Angelo Gilardino, whose music he often used to accompany the flow of his filming in an extraordinarily refined way
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Manuele Cecconello (1969) began taking photographs at the age of 13 in the studio of his painter father.
Solitary and uncompromising researcher, he soon comes into contact with auteur and avant-garde cinema that will lead him towards humanistic studies, poetry, contemporary music.
Play with films, super 8, obsolete optics, processing.
He dedicated himself to cinema and video from the end of the eighties, discovering how the moving image is made through the creation of a hundred experimental films.
In the early 2000s he hybridized cinema of reality and expressive research, producing and directing with his company, Prospettiva Nevsky, various historical, lyrical and anthropological documentaries that earned him numerous international awards.
In parallel, he continues to conduct educational, photographic and cinematographic projects, recently converged on digital communication platforms.
Cecconello's aesthetic combines the reproductive power of the cinematographic device with a peculiar stylistic elaboration that draws on pictorial suggestions and makes use of the potential of digital technology.
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On the things of the world - roads, houses, landscapes, residual humanity - and on natural elements, the author applies a participatory and insightful gaze, which aims to rediscover the meaning of his object, to penetrate its secret.
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For the significance of the locations, for its photographic properties, for the sound mixture and for the rhythm impressed by the editing, the work of Manuele Cecconello constitutes an extraordinarily innovative experience in relation to the dominant conventions of Italian cinema.
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Luca Bandirali
Therefore, in every film or photographic series, it is a question of combining a participatory attention to things, an inexhaustible curiosity for the world, with a strong impetus for transcendence, formal and spiritual at the same time.
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The world is welcomed in the concreteness of its creatures, its lights and its sounds, but also transfigured in terms of skilful framing composition, highly calibrated combination of stasis and dynamism, pictorial depth, chromatic gradation, musical cadence.
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In Cecconello's cinema, the cinematographic discourse works the surface of reality as time acts on space: it cracks its solidity and consumes its consistency, but it also defines its direction and grasps its meaning.
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Enrico Terone
