The Monochromatic Vision of Giordano Macellari
The ancient beech forest of Canfaito, located in the Marche region of Italy, is widely known as a realm of color and monumental trees. Every year, crowds of photographers go there to capture the reassuring palette of autumn leaves or the majesty of the beeches, reducing the landscape to a simple tourist postcard and cliché.
Giordano Macellari makes a deliberate choice to break away from this tradition: he rejects color and shifts the subject entirely. Where everyone else is distracted by the canopy of the trees, Macellari focuses his gaze on what lives in the shadows of the woods: the cattle in the open air. Through a dramatic black and white style, sharp in its contrasts and dominated by absolute blacks and piercing whites, the animals are stripped of their bucolic context. Instead, they are presented as archetypes of an ancient, monumental sacredness. This is the continuation of his painting style on film, a search for the essential that rejects any commercial compromise.
This visual journey is not a documentary record of a place, but a psychological and conceptual voyage, a visionary flow that moves between stability and instability. The artist transforms the cattle into pure visual tension—plastic forms suspended between appearance and dissolution, standing out against the severe geometry of the forest shadows.
Consistent with his life journey of total reclamation of time and space, the artist does not offer the usual nature postcard, but instead imposes his own personal vision of reality. He forces us to shift our attention, stripping our eyes of the superfluous to look at the world not as it appears, but as its essence demands to be seen.
Text by Luce