This large diptych plunges into the painting that inhabits our collective memory. We recognise Renoir and his landscapes, bathed in chromatic vibrations that dissolve forms into light. But the blue, the deep, radiant blue, retains Monet’s signature. And in this diptych of blue, green, pink, and orange, like you, I inevitably see Monet’s Water Lilies. Monet too had imagined diptychs and even polyptychs, to convey light as it breaks and multiplies on the water surfaces and water lilies of his garden at Giverny. The Water Lilies are not merely a series of paintings: they are an optical experience born in the garden, a true horticultural laboratory that Monet had shaped as an extension of his own vision. Monet painted these last, most moving canvases when he was almost blind; his painting became a memory of colours, interior harmonies distilled from a lifelong practice. Here, in Amura, we find a constellation of fireworks; in Monet, a garden. Yet the result converges: light droplets moving across a blue background. Whether it is water, or the Neapolitan night lit by the echoes of New Year’s Eve, it is up to us to dream these correspondences—the sum of our own sensitivity.Napex 221037

Sylvain Bellenger