Gianni Berengo Gardin in search of the 'reality that inhabits works'

Entering Giorgio Morandi's studio meant accepting a suspension of the world, a concentration that was a superior form of listening. It was from there that Gianni Berengo Gardin's work began when, in 1993, he photographed that Bolognese atelier shortly before it was dismantled, translating what was there into photos and beauty. His images do not recount a place, but a discipline of the gaze. Putting aside all nostalgia by favouring a profoundly modern idea that the visible is a threshold and not a datum.

Berengo Gardin, who passed away last year, always practised a photography that distrusts emphasis and seduction. His black and white is a moral exercise before being an aesthetic one, a desire to subtract in order to understand, to slow down in order to see. In front of Morandi's dusty bottles, dishes marked by time and surfaces consumed by light, the Ligurian photographer does not seek the symbol but the measure that is a bit of a lesson that runs through all his work, "because," he said, "reality should not be explained, but inhabited".

This 'journey in a room' - as one might call it - now becomes the silent heart of the Gianni Berengo Gardin exhibition.

This one at the Gallerie d'Italia is an unmissable exhibition, because it is hosted in their vault, a space that could not be more eloquent, born to guard values, transformed into a device of absolute concentration. Descending into that place, which is never open to the public, means accepting a progressive removal of light, noise and distractions. It is here that the 26 photographs find an almost natural resonance, as if the architecture itself participated in that idea of industrious seclusion that Morandi had elected as his method.

The exhibition avoids any didacticism, because metaphysics, here, is neither a historical label nor a movement to be circumscribed, but a posture of the gaze. It is the conviction that the enigma does not lie beyond things, but within their stubborn presence. Bottles, vases and coffee pots: objects that, when crossed by the right light, stop being tools and become events. Berengo Gardin understands this and, with an almost ascetic modesty, approaches them to the point of coinciding with that severe and lyrical grammar that Morandi had built up throughout his life. And the vault then, is not only the theatre of this encounter, but the point of access to one of Milan's most surprising collections: a living repository of Italian and international modernity, from Mario Schifano to Alberto Burri, from Giosetta Fioroni to Enrico Castellani, up to Anselm Kiefer, a story that does not proceed by layers, juxtapositions and counterpoints. In this sense, the Berengo Gardin exhibition functions as a key to understanding the entire museum, "a place that is alive and open to the community", to quote Michele Coppola - Executive Director Art, Culture and Historical Heritage Intesa Sanpaolo and General Director of the Gallerie d'Italia. An exhibition that reminds us that art is not entertainment, but exercise, and that there is still - and perhaps more than ever - a need for places where the gaze can be educated, challenged, even contradicted. Leaving the vault, walking back towards the light of Piazza Scala, a rare sensation remains: not that of having seen something important, but of having learned to see a little better. And this is perhaps the greatest luxury a museum can afford today.