At the end of the Sixties Cesare Monti has been working first as an assistant to Romano Cagnoni, one of the prestigious Magnum Agency’s photographers, then to Harri Peccinotti for “Tween” magazine and to visual artist Clay Ragazzini who at the time was collaborating with Apple Records. Back in Italy in 1971, Cesare started out as a conceptual creative photographer in the music industry for Numero Uno, Cramps, Trident, Produttori Associati, PolyGram, RCA, CBS, Emi, Ascolto, Ultima Spiaggia (which he was a partner of), Sony, WEA.
With Vanda Spinello, his significant other in life and in art, Cesare produced record covers for Lucio Battisti, Area, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Edoardo Bennato, Pierangelo Bertoli, Angelo Branduardi, Pino Daniele, Fabrizio De André, Dik Dik, Equipe 84, Eugenio Finardi, Formula Tre, Ivano Fossati, Enzo Jannacci, Bruno Lauzi, Mia Martini, Adriano Pappalardo, PFM, Oscar Prudente, Demetrio Stratos and many more. Around the same time he art directed the underground magazine “Re nudo”.
In 1979 he moved to New York to join Rolling Stone Records and topped that frantic experimental period with his book/exhibition “The Hero”. Back in Italy again in 1981 he completely devoted himself to visual arts experimenting and mixing various techniques of “sound and vision”. In 1983 he shot “Ario” in 35mm using about 4.000 photographs shot with a Nikon camera with motordrive. He resumed the same technique in 1987 for “Il vento”.
Interested in electronic publishing, Cesare produced “Gli uomini sottili” with a new emphasis on the acoustic aspects of a work that aimed at a new balance between visual, literary and acoustic expression. In 1989 “Irlanda” moved even further while “Inferno” was a fantastic voyage between Dante e the worst nightmares of the year 2000.
Many exhibitions then followed in Milan (Galleria L’Affiche, Galleria Murnik, Galleria Milla, Politecne Cinematografica Goethe Institut, Galleria Mudima), Turin, Bologna, Locarno, Basilea, Dusseldorff, Varna, Paris and New York. He now founded, along with Franco Bolelli and Franco Berardi Bifo, two research groups on poetic communications: “Ario” (which spunned a magazine with the same name) and “DNA”. At the same time he started working as director for advertising videos exclusively for Film Master until 1992 and then for Central. He would also direct workshops of “image poetry” at the Università di Architettura of Milan and at the Università di Comunicazione in Parma.
From the mid-Nineties onward he extensively studied the works of Girolamo Savonarola, conceiving under Padre Armando Verde‘s guidance a multimedia project which should have been part of a series called “Gli Eretici”. In March 1997 due to this outstanding research he received a Laurea Honoris Causa in Humanistic Sciences from Universitas Internationalis Studium Superiorum “Pro Deo” in New York.
In 1998 he was appointed creative manager of the Italian section of the Lisboa Expo. A year later Lucio Battisti e la Numero Uno, a book containing 114 never before seen images from his private collection, got published. After having worked as a communications strategy consultant for Mediaset, Tiscali and other big Italian brands, in 2002 Cesare became managing director of the Centro Ricerca of the European School of Economics, an Italian private university where new formats of communication for entrepreneurs were being studied. He’s now focusing on new technologies applied to art as creative manager of the research center Il Tempo del Sale.
