Sacri Monti. 2009 

Sacri Monti means holy mountains. That's the name of nine pilgrimage sites in Northern Italy that were constructed  on mountains and lake shores in the late 16th and 17th century. The life story of Jesus and other saints is represented with symbolic and spiritual significance in the spacious chapel complexes. Terracotta figures and illusionist paintings coalesce into pictures with sometimes strange beauty. Betram Kober opens up these special testimonials for the present with new perspectives and moods of light.

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What do the scenes from the Sacri Monti in Varese, Varallo, Domodossola and Ghiffa show us? The story of stories is the salvific history that culminates in the story of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The wonderful life stories of great saints, the mother of God, and Saint Francis of Assisi (Orta) are connected to or derived from that story. The accounts of the Passion build the core and the climax of the gospels. Presenting them in the most touching way possible means to make them real. Thus the figures are life-sized, The faces look like those of our contemporaries when they are excited, disfigured by pain or sadness or affected perhaps by inner convocation or movement. Monstrous torturers with goiters on their necks, sadistic tormentors abuse Christ bearing his heavy cross. His hand clenches the cross beam, his gaze has already almost left the harrowing reality of the scene. With his steady view, Bertram Kober has captured the arrangement of the looks. The slight overexposure makes sure that the three-dimensional foreground and the fresco in the background seamlessly blend together as it should be. Time has passed, Christ's halo is lying on the ground, the figures urgently need restoration and yet the vera icon, the "true picture" from the Veil of Veronica looks at us. We're talking about a miracle here. The miracle that crosses time. Historical legends in the light of negated and repealed time, i.e. eternity.

What does Bertram Kober cut out of the scenes? Looks have obviously done something to him. The head of an old man is peeking out from behind a curtain, that cloaks and hides everything else. A young cleric in laced rochet is looking at us from the damaged fresco in the background. His outstretched arm is pointing where we should be looking. All of this just makes up the background for the fully plastic figure in the foreground. Also a young cleric. He has gathered his rochet with one hand, and his entire body is bent and tensed in contrapposto. Where he is looking, we don't know. It is again the look that we find fascinating about this face. As with some Impressionists, the looks don't meet. The scene gets its tension from the crossed paths of the looks, from the targets of the eyes, that also effect us viewers magnetically. We see the look and where it is looking. Bertram Kober keeps these targets from us. This calculation makes his pictures contemporary. It strengthens the impertinence of the miracles and increases their latency. We recognize some things, a lot is kept from us. Anyone, who doesn't know the story of the passion, sees a body that a man is lowering from a ladder into the arms of a figure that has to receive this load  shocked and wide-eyed and open-mouthed. A different face a hand extends into the picture. Hard contrasts of light. The disciples fall into ecstasy in front of the box of the empty grave. Their hands wrung in prayer, the arms stretching up, the adoring look, even the wonderfully internalized look of the disciple in the foreground, of which we cannot say if it is directed inward or into the box, all of this follows a standard choreography. Bertram Kober lets us look in the box, where an energy-saving light bulb and other modern junk makes it clear, in which time we are living. However, due to the break caused by the look through the camera, the topic becomes as gripping as it once was.

... When an artistic photographer takes on works of art, that is to say art is laid over art, we encounter in this case two eras. Suddenly, the 21st century becomes synchronous with the Baroque era. Bertram Kober makes this meta-level visible often enough by introducing partition walls – no not walls, but instead grates, a second level that is penetrated. On the one hand it interrupts our view and removes a perhaps naïve immediacy, on the other hand it makes that into a central theme. The space gets depth. We relearn how to see with the steering eye of the camera. We know this from films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who sends the camera through glass doors or lace curtains for minutes on end and in this way lends his strongest scenes a mystic quality. Grates are also part of the staging in situ. When a contemporary photographer turns to a highpoint of mimetic art and when he succeeds in literally unsheathing this visual art, pictures of absorbing intensity are created. Bertram Kober has provided evidence for this.

Prof. Eckhard Nordhofen
Excerpts from: Sacri Monti In. Bertram Kober – Sacri Monti. Kerber Verlag. 2009. Pages 99 - 101

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