Alfonso Bricegno is a Belgium-based photographer whose analog and digital works exist at the edge of interpretation, living and breathing in the limelight of solitude, confinement, and poetic vision.
The experimental artist sheds a gritty, grey-hazed shadow over his subjects, purposefully encapsulating them in a veil of mystery and concealing their meaning. “Images that unfold slowly,” he calls them, “images that resist instant readability and invite the viewer to stay.”
Bricegno’s work is an ethereal and gloomy “dialogue between uncertainty and presence.” The presence in the photographs is lurking in the shadows, menacingly revealing itself to the flash of a camera. It is more unsettling than complete solitude in the midst of the night.
The series carries a clear “Lynchian” quality. The images offer a space to step into if the viewers dare to do so. The darkness is alluring, whispering a promise of a venture into an exciting, mysterious unknown. “I am interested in images that do not offer immediate answers but open space for contemplation,” says the photographer, “they arise from embracing ambiguity.”
The ongoing explorative element of the Venezuela-born artist goes even further, into the depths of the night, drawing a “thick line” between the inside and the outside, and tracing a robust, almost striking parallel between the landscape and the subconscious in a sort of “as above, so below” photographic interpretation. Deliberately exposing himself to the calm of darkness allows the photographer to pierce the seen and navigate the unseen. Bricegno explains: “I walk through spaces where visibility is limited and perception becomes uncertain. In that fragile threshold, photography shifts from documentation to meditation. What matters is not what is clearly seen but what is sensed.”
“Darkness functions as material rather than absence. Light appears quietly—not as a revelation, but as a subtle interruption. The landscapes seem empty, yet they carry emotional density: memory, distance, solitude, and suspended time,” he concludes.
Read our “Aberration” issue in full
The 31 artists featured in RAWGUE. Magazine’s 5th issue stray from the expected, taking untrodden paths, contemplating imperfection, solitude in its many forms, and the ongoing process of self-acceptance. Through shifting perspectives, their works explore what it means to look at oneself from the outside, as if through broken glass.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
