Aurelio Amendola is at the same time witness of Michelangelo's plastic grandeur and narrator/illustrator of the protagonists of the 20th century avant-garde, as the series of artists' portraits and the one dedicated to Alberto Burri's combustions demonstrate.

The exhibition takes its title from a verse of sonnet 97 from Michelangelo's Rime, in which the artist expresses the inevitable condition of the spirit at the origin of artistic research. Through Amendola's photographic images, the viewer is offered a new vision of Michelangelo's and Alberto Burri's work, where that fire that forges the artwork becomes the trait d'union between the two artists.

Amendola acts on the thin borderline between a new look and expectation. And it is through the transfiguration of forms, the play of light and shadow, and close-ups that the photographer recovers a virginity of vision, the wonder of seeing through dialogue. There is therefore no trace in his actions of the virtuosic ostentation of being a photographer. He interrogates Michelangelo, awaits answers, places himself in a condition of listening and not of appropriation, discovering “the sacred time of reflection and listening”; he chases Burri's gesturality, investigating and following the artist's will in an unexpectedly cinematographic organicity and sequentiality.

For Amendola, the image of the sculptural artwork is not a totally decontextualized consumer product, offered to a public that is often unaware of both spiritual and historical-artistic reasons; instead, sculpture becomes a source of mystery, a place of discovery, where the photographic eye returns to make sculpture speak of what it is and what it can be. In him, authorship becomes a form of intellectual rigor and not exhibitionism in the media vulgate of culture.