Brett Lloyd's Naples on display at Thomas Dane Gallery

On Saturday, April 1 in the Neapolitan setting of Thomas Dane Gallery, British photographer Brett Lloyd presented a selection of photographs from his solo project entitled Napoli, Napoli, Napoli. An anaphora in the white rooms and along the gallery's covered terrace resonates like a youthful hymn, a stadium chorus. Pompeian figures of a Satyricon now extinguished, unpacked of complex volutes and rich Castellani-style pendants. Lloyd gives us back a simple, true, adolescent nudity that has the salty taste of summer baths and perhaps blinds us like the sun at its zenith. No voices are heard, but attentive and fearless glances of inner-city scugnizzi, who appear algid and unshakable sculptural protagonists of a "petty" Italian-style coming-of-age novel, crowded with moped rides, fall and that inexplicable, as much as atavistic, feeling of belonging to something more complex and less circumscribable than a city. «There is something about Naples that conjures up the entire arc of its past,» Lloyd himself said in recounting his relationship with the city of Naples, with which the photographer had a real love affair. «As Pier Paolo Pasolini once noted about Naples “The people live as if there were no break with their ancient history» he added.

Being rubble and temple, light and night, misery and nobility, that eternal Dichotomy that is Neapolitan-ness. From Von Glöeden to Jared French and Paul Cadmus, the photographer reconstructs a Mythical Arcadia rionale, which echoes memories of Pompeian frescoes and the vain poses of enfants terribles as tormented as they are delicate, only in appearance as fragile as petals, but solid in their identity. Lloyd's sun-baked Neapolitans, bronzed and fearless, have swaggering looks but open palms; Stephen Tennat's Mediterraneans, are dreamers of yesterday and tomorrow. The event also provided an opportunity for a charity to benefit the Friends of Naples Onlus Association engaged in restoration projects.