Arnò
in Naples
— Italy

   Arnò is a French painter living in Naples, with two daughters and a beautiful house. He’s a man who smiles a lot, and he invites me into his home, curious about what I’m about to do there. “Narrating a house and a life”, I imagine him thinking, “how can it be done?” And in fact, this might not be fully possible, though he tries to speak of the city with colours, which must not be so easy either. When Arnò came to Naples for the first time, I can understand what must have happened, because it also happened to me, twenty-five years ago. You arrive in Naples and bang! – there is an explosion of amazement, disbelief, folly, and love. Because no matter what others tell you about Naples, you will never be ready for what you will find in this city. For example, the people, the shouts, the songs, the conversations from balcony to balcony in its working-class neighbourhoods. “When I returned to Paris after my first three months here, my friends saw what I had painted and they all said ‘You went to the city of Vesuvius and you didn’t even paint it once’. As a matter of fact, when you arrive in Naples you stay inside Naples, you look around, you spend days observing streets and faces, alleys and balconies. You don’t search for the postcard views and the landscapes. “I left Paris on the first of April when it was still winter, and here I found this particular light and blues in the sky. In Paris you can spend a whole winter and the sky seems to be white and faded. Here light is everywhere, and it can distract you, disorient you, and capture you”. The light can be blinding, the city can swallow you up. Today Arnò has gotten away from the chaos of the historical centre, and he lives in a neighbourhood where you can see the islands, the gulf, the sea, and Vesuvius. When he arrived in Naples they took him to a party, where he met a woman who is now his wife.

   “She’s a lawyer, she defends the innocent, I say, and she says I am her artistic side”. There is silence in the house. To paint, Arnò goes into a small room crowded with canvases, never invaded by the sunlight. “There is a Neapolitan writer, Raffaele La Capria, who narrates: it is impossible to really shut the light out of a house. In Naples, the concept of a beautiful day does not exist; we are open to the east, so as soon as the sun comes up you already know it will be a beautiful day. You cannot stay inside, you get sucked outside.

   So when the seasons change and days get a bit shorter, I tell myself I can finally concentrate a little on myself - I start to be selective, I go out less; the evenings are longer, which allows me time to study subjects and take photos. At times I see a subject for years, but it doesn’t strike me because the light wasn’t just right”; but sooner or later the “right light” happens. In a city that isn’t yours but has become yours, the city will never be yours yet already is. “I feel very Mediterranean”, Arnò tells me, which perhaps means that he always searches for the right light, and always will.