Description
Napex 257120 Napoli Explosion
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..
Napoli Explosion
The window of my bedroom overlooked Mount Vesuvius, and every morning, with reverence, I whispered a good morning to it as one would address a slumbering person, afraid of awakening them. The volcano is a living presence for anyone living at its slopes. For over 12 years, on New Year's Eve, my team and I ascend Mount Faito, a mountain overlooking the Bay of Naples, to capture the extraordinary choreography of lights and colors produced by fireworks all around Vesuvius. Through this superstitious and propitiatory ritual, the people of Naples welcome the new year. The image of the black and silent silhouette of the volcano submerged by the cacophony of fireworks' colors seemed to me a representation that needed to be explored seriously and viewed from different perspectives.
Over the years, the project has evolved into an experimentation of new forms of writing with light, using a unique color palette provided by the hundreds of thousands of fireworks exploding simultaneously. Over time, Napoli Explosion has become a work in search of the feeling of light.
