The artist is already well-known to both Italian and international audiences for his iconic series of analog photographs—black and white or color—depicting cities across the globe: Athens, Rome, Milan, Venice, Verona, Noto, Naples, Shanghai, Washington, Lisbon, Barcelona, Basel, New York, New Delhi. These works are created using the analog technique of multiple exposure during shooting: that is, between four and nine exposures on a single frame. The result is a layering of the distinctive traits of these places—monuments, urban landscapes, paintings, sculptures—forming a dense visual memory.

For the Verona exhibition, Bramante employs this same technique with a new thematic focus: fire. A metaphorical element that, as the artist notes, “can be innate to the human soul or possessed in various forms, exerting a kind of control over it.” But fire also appears here in its literal form—particularly fireworks—referred to in Sicilian as U jocu focu, a source of enduring fascination for the artist.

The exhibition’s title thus references these fireworks displays, which in the tradition of religious festivals represent an important ritual accompanying the celebration.

As curator Massimo Sgroi observes:

“Bramante retrieves the folkloric ritual—the festival as it relates to the divine—as a sociological medium of collective creation. The sculptural vases, photographs, and installations made from images of festivals in the Val di Noto ultimately redefine the boundaries of our almost tribal, pagan relationship with the divine. Bramante executes this reinterpretation in conceptual, absolute terms, where the firework that celebrates the deity (or the saint derived from it) becomes part of the ritual—or, seen from another worldview, a tragic spectacle of death.”

In the installation created for Studio la Città, the artist presents large-scale double-sided photographic prints on PVC that resemble curtains—each hand-cut into various patterns—onto which he has applied festoons and paper remnants collected from the ground after fireworks displays during local festivals in the Val di Noto, his birthplace. Hung from the ceiling, these towering images descend to just a few centimeters from the floor and “can be stirred by the wind or passed through by the viewer, becoming a living, floating work.”

Threaded between these images is an apparently disordered path marked by several parallelepipeds, on which terracotta vases stand.

“Together, these works evoke—though shaped by different forces—the vitality of movement: in one, it is the wind or the human body that animates them, making them sway in a suspended dimension of time and space; in the other, movement is embedded in the force of the hands that shape the clay before the fire renders it sculptural.”