Giovanni Maria Sacco's Concrete Metaphysics on display in Milan.

On November 14, 2024, on the occasion of the 2024 edition of Book City Milano, the exhibition Metafisica Concreta opened at Still Fotografia Milano, presenting a selection of photographs, all in black and white, from the book of the same name Metafisica Concreta by Giovanni Maria Sacco ( Contrasto edition, 2024). The exhibition itinerary of the show - which will continue until January 31, 2025 - consists of 30 photographs: a corpus that traces a long period of research by Giovanni Maria Sacco (Rome, 1954) around the concept, dear to the author, of the overall study of all things that exist (being). A study that has as its core places, landscapes and architecture through which Sacco’s camera establishes an underlying link, “returning a refined synthesis between metaphysical thinking and knowing how to see beyond reality as it appears. I like to think that each photograph is a scene that testifies to a bond of belonging to the whole,” as curator Benedetta Donato writes in the book’s introduction.

What emerges, in the exhibition as well as in the book, is an all-encompassing visual exploration of some of the key points of Italian identity, whose architectural landscape - the subject on which Sacco’s theoretical reflection is focused in this work - bears the marks of a long stratification of culture and thought, which in the author’s photographs becomes a matrix for understanding the “objective correlative,” that poetic procedure initially identified by T.S. Eliot according to which “through some concrete objects, capable of arousing in the reader what the artist intends and feels without the need for mediation or explanation, one is able to evoke a ’particular emotion,’” as Flavia Concina points out in her contribution to the book.

“With this work by Giovanni Maria Sacco, we find ourselves observing extensions of thought, where photography becomes the means of revealing a long process of reflection and interpretation with respect to the field of metaphysics,” Benedetta Donato continues. “Reporting through images a way of feeling and seeing reality is an exercise that the author conducts by projecting his own mental space onto the world, of which he returns what he himself calls ’metaphors’ in the afterword. His research is thus a continuous invitation to look at reality beyond how one sees it, delving into another and unknown dimension that the images in this book and in the exhibition make perceptible and palpable from the moment they are observed.”

Sacco’s metaphysics

Sacco’s metaphysics is composed of indeterminacy and meaning other and accompanies the visitor’s gaze along the concreteness and minimalist rigor of some of Italy’s most important rationalist buildings, photographed over the course of several years and made on large-format film, and through the timelessness of architectural archetypes, where immunity from the passage of time is discovered. It also leads the viewer to consider a human condition dense with the “loneliness of existence.” Sacco’s images are silent and without people: humanity is perceived in absence, underscoring, as the photographer writes, that "the reality of things is independent of the presence of observers and, I am convinced, absolutely indifferent to humanity.

“Metaphysics is concerned with what lies beyond the physical universe that we perceive. In this context, one of the relevant aspects, and the one that interests me most in my photographic production, concerns the essence of things, that is, how things really are beyond appearance. It is evident how this cannot be described in words, but only with metaphors. And so it is with metaphors that I have tried to describe what, for me, is metaphysics, and as the title says, a concrete metaphysics. An oxymoron, because metaphysics transcends perception and therefore cannot be concrete. The English translation of the title, Concrete Metaphysics, presents an additional aspect of these metaphors. Concrete, in fact, means both concrete and cement. Metaphysics of stone, then,” Sacco continues in the afterword.

The itinerary of concrete metaphors proposed in the book and in the selection of images in the exhibition documents territories and works such as Borgo Schirò(Palermo), Burri ’s Cretto in Gibellina Nuova, the Pyramid of the 38th Parallel in Motta d’Affermo(Messina). But also Livorno, La Scarzuola, Modena, Cesenatico and Turin; as well as Tresigallo, Altivole, Varigotti, Latina, Rome, Bomarzo, Tirrenia and many other places, subjects of that architectural and metaphysical concreteness that allows the photographer to offer “an image of transcendent reality and the emotions it arouses in me, and perhaps in you as well: estrangement, mystery, beauty, harmony.” A theoretical reflection on the nature of things evokes a reflection on the very act of seeing.

Alongside a coherent and linear narrative, in which the composition is studied and in perfect balance, Sacco outlines a clear path of intentions, letting his personal authorial feeling emerge thanks to a black white and contrast studied and controlled down to the smallest details.

The exhibition accompanies the release of the book Metafisica Concreta (146 pages, 102 images) published by Contrasto, with texts by Benedetta Donato, Flavia Concina and Giovanni Maria Sacco.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Still Fotografia Milano.

Notes on the artist

Giovanni Maria Sacco (born 1954 in Rome) was a university professor of computer science for 30 years until he resigned to follow his passion for photography. He has been photographing since the age of eight. His motto is that of Walt Whitman: “I am great. I contain multitudes.” Her photographs embrace many different themes: modern ruins (large factories, especially), architecture, still life, portraits, nudes, etc. In all these themes, what Sacco seeks is the beauty he finds both in the impermanence and decline of human things and in the impassibility of architectural constructions. Given his training, he applies Ockham’s razor to his images: everything and only what is needed, nothing more, nothing less. The composition of his photographs is also deeply influenced by his interest in painting, from Duccio to contemporary painters.

Since 2015, he has received over a hundred awards in major international competitions: Architecture Master Prize, International Photo Awards (IPA), Fine Art Photography Awards (FAPA), Prix de la Photographie Paris (PX3), among others. His works have been exhibited in Turin, Milan, Rome, Trieste, Venice, Arles, Glasgow, New York, Miami, Dali (China), Dubai, Tokyo and Zurich.

In 2023 he published with Kehrer Verlag the book Silent Theaters. Metafisica Concreta is his latest publication, published by Contrasto (2024).

Giovanni Maria Sacco's Concrete Metaphysics on display in Milan.

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