Until April 1, 2024, in the Real Bosco di Capodimonte at the Cellaio, the exhibition "Napoli Explosion" by Mario Amura, curated by General Director Sylvain Bellenger.
The exhibition—opened on December 14—presents 37 large-scale works by photographer Mario Amura, who, in a project spanning over 13 years, has immortalized in photographic paintings the fireworks display that the Neapolitan people stage around Mount Vesuvius on New Year's Eve.
"Neapolitans exorcise their fear of the volcano exploding by making the entire Gulf of Naples explode with light and color." says Mario Amura: "Every year, on December 31st, I climb Mount Faito with a crew of some of my closest friends, the mountain that looms over the Gulf of Naples, facing Mount Vesuvius. From there, we capture this sort of exorcism against the inhuman forces of the volcano, of fate. The result, while essentially a work of photographic reportage, is extraordinarily pictorial: the fireworks become nebulae, animals, starscapes.
"When they told me about the Napoli Explosion" says Bellenger "I could not imagine the extraordinary relationship the author had established with light.
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In Amura's photographs, the iconographic imagery of Vesuvius as a symbol of Naples is subverted: while in the gouaches and masterpieces of Turner, Marlow, Volaire, and Warhol, it is colored by the lava that floods it, in Naples Explosion, on the contrary, Vesuvius appears, indeed, as a silent shadow submerged by the explosion of the fireworks of the New Year's celebrations.
"The most striking aspect of Napoli Explosion is its choral nature.", says Art Historian Prof. Salvatore Settis, President of the Louvre's Scientific Committee. "During the night of the passage to the new year, the city of Naples is populated by thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who set off or watch these fireworks explode and do not know that they are contributing to a pictorial work.".
Says the exhibition curator Sylvain Bellenger: Amura captures the time of light, which ends up being the gesture of the brushstroke. The transformative effect of reality enacted in Napoli Explosion is such that it forcefully reaffirms that photography has its own imaginary zone, such an imaginary freedom that is not even controlled by the photographer. The photographer can play with it, but he is like the ceramist, he cannot control the colors, he cannot control the glaze of the ceramic. It is the firing that determines the density of the color. And firing is difficult to control. It is measurable but not controllable. One almost feels like saying that photography, Amura's photography, is an art of fire, like terracotta, like ceramics. The great cultural revolution of our time is linked to the evolution of technology. Digitalization is transforming our memory, our way of thinking, our way of organizing language. Napoli Explosion was born in the era of digital images, and it is the new millennium that it celebrates with fireworks that could be invented, but which are instead photographed. And what strikes me most is that it is the oldest art of technical capture of reality, photography, to prove to be the most imaginative."
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