Napex 7303222
MARIO AMURA
2017
Single Edition 240×160 cm Fine Art print Hahnemühle
This image, taken in 2017, and its companion, taken in 2014, are two variations on the same motif: the volcano, a magnetic centre that, since the Grand Tour, has drawn artists and travellers. From the English painter Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), witness of the industrial age, to the French artist Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729–1799), true portraitist of Vesuvius in eruption, to the Dane Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857), and to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751–1829), who came to Naples with Goethe, the volcano became an essential landmark of the European gaze. Here, the nocturnal landscape transforms into a luminous script in which red and black construct two distinct dramaturgies. In the first image, a uniform red sky sharply outlines the dark mass of the volcano, while the city lights stretch into long, regular drips, revealing a steady exposure time and a broad movement. In the second, the reds are more vibrant, streaked with waves, and the volcano’s shadow dissolves into a more unstable atmosphere; the shorter, more nervous light trails have been compared to a tide of question marks or to a migration of flamingos turned red like lava. These differences suggest a slight variation in gesture or exposure duration, though from the same vantage point. The framing, apparently identical, nonetheless opens onto two different worlds: one dominated by the vertical gravity of fire, the other by the incandescent vibration of the sky. Even without an eruption, Vesuvius associated with red immediately evokes in our minds the incandescent lava historically linked to this mountain. Together, these images extend the long visual tradition of the volcano which, since the Grand Tour, has continually reinvented the very shape of the landscape.Napex 7303222