Della Grazie
In Della Grazie, Apartment HD conducts a meditative visual inquiry into the spatial and temporal fabric of Milan, engaging a photographic language that abstracts the city into its most essential and evocative elements. The series departs from conventional documentation, instead employing a sweeping, perception that moves across the urban landscape to condense what is permanent and what is transitory. Through this approach, Milan becomes not a subject to be captured, but a presence to be experienced —a shifting interplay of visibility and invisibility.
Anchored conceptually by Santa Maria delle Grazie—home to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper—the work echoes the spiritual and aesthetic weight of Renaissance tradition, but without direct illustration. Architecture becomes impression, memory becomes structure, and the photographic surface operates as a palimpsest where form and absence coexist. Through minimal compositions and an attentiveness to spatial rhythm, Della Grazie abstracts Milan’s materiality into a poetics of atmosphere and trace.
Crucially, the project incorporates a selection process that oscillates between the familiar and the indeterminate. Some images contain faint or recognizable markers—subtle cues that may orient the viewer within Milan’s iconic geography—while others retreat into ambiguity. A photograph may be taken just outside a monumental site such as the Duomo, yet the grandeur of the structure remains unseen, effaced entirely by the scanning technique. In such instances, what emerges is not definable architecture, people or objects, but the ghostlike presence of what is caught passing momentarily through the scene, what is meant to be exposed. Their appearance is both incidental and intentional in shaping what is rendered visible and what remains hidden.
In this way, Della Grazie presents the ephemeral and the fragmentary as central to the act of seeing. The camera does not simply observe; it studies and examines abstracting the city into gestures, textures, and thresholds. Movement, shadow, and silence are given equal weight as visual content. The work invites viewers to consider perception not as fixed, but as contingent—formed in the interplay between light, form, and the unpredictable encounters of the everyday.
Ultimately, Della Grazie positions Milan not as a static or complete entity, but as a living, breathing structure of simultaneity: sacred and secular, enduring and momentary, legible and unknowable. The city becomes, both archive and apparition, a site where the visible world and its ghostly doubles coalesce—where the act of looking is always also an act of loss, of abstraction, and of re-imagining space anew.
