Description
Napex 7303222 Napoli Explosion
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.
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.
