From November 13, 2024 to January 5, 2025, Rifugio Digitale presents the exhibition Aurelio Amendola for Michelangelo. The primacy of the informal, by the award-winning photographer Aurelio Amendola, curated by Antonio Natali. The event is organized in collaboration with Forma Edizioni.

The primacy of the informal

At the end of 2022, about thirty large photographs taken by Aurelio Amendola of Michelangelo’s Pietà Bandini were displayed in the Sala del Paradiso at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, shortly after the completion of a restoration that had freed the sculpture from numerous degrading accretions.

Aurelio had not been asked to document the results of this restoration, which had been carried out with great sensitivity, but rather to offer his interpretation of a work that is part of the Michelangelo corpus, a body of work that he has studied and interpreted almost in its entirety. His visual exegesis of the Florentine Pietà returns to the monumental sculpture—indeed, elevating it—the vocation to express emotions laden with pathos, which Aurelio captures through powerful contrasts of light and shadow. The resulting image conveys a tangle of limbs that is half true to life and half abstract.

In this exhibition at ‘Rifugio’, however, the focus is on abstraction and informal figuration. Aurelio was asked to direct his lens towards aniconic fragments, not by setting up a new ‘campaign,’ but by extracting from his previously taken photographs of Michelangelo’s works those moments in which aniconic elements emerge. Sometimes, this leads to enchantment.

The images alone speak volumes about his poignant explorations of the material. In the Roman Pietà, Aurelio’s gaze is captivated by the epiphanies of smooth surfaces delicately polished by a warm light that transforms the marble into wax. Wax that now hardens and clumps together like the folds of an oak-like drapery, and now softens, almost flattening the gaps between the swelling and subtle sagging of the flesh. In the Pietà Bandini, his gaze lingers instead on the abrasions, the rough-hewn marks of the chisel and rasp, the accidental scuffs, the roughness, and the random wrinkles.

In both sculptures, Aurelio recognizes a new kind of beauty — one that nature, with its inscrutable designs, which are inaccessible to us, creates spontaneously

Antonio Natali