Napex 257120
MARIO AMURA
2025
Single Edition 240×160 cm Fine Art print Hahnemühle
Fire, caramel, honey, or perhaps a lake of liquid flames: Vesuvius rises from a kind of golden tide whose nature cannot be discerned. It is the intense mist of that night of December 31, 2025, that gives the light this liquid, almost creamy quality, as though the color itself had melted into a flowing substance. The light has liquefied to the point where it no longer shows sparks or flickers, those usually produced by distance and by its passage through the atmosphere. From this luminous expanse emerges a small point, like the tip of a breast. And then there is that blue of Vesuvius, an impossible blue, belonging neither to mountain nor to sky, born from the night itself, pushed to its extreme by the photographer, like a painter forcing reality in order to draw out a secret color of his own imagination. There is something profoundly erotic and at the same time mysterious in this vision of Vesuvius which, on New Year’s Eve, appears wrapped not in its own fire but in a lake of light that caresses and envelops it. It is a marvellous and ironically inverted image: as if Naples, for one night, were defying the volcano by tenderly submerging it in light, instead of letting itself be buried beneath its ashes.Napex 257120