Magnets

Aurelio Amendola - Pistoia magnet

Cattedrale di San Zeno, Pistoia, 2002

"Amendola celebrates the piazza of his Pistoia by choosing silence. Almost a metaphysical silence as a tribute to De Chirico: known, frequented, photographed. His is not a city teeming with arts and crafts, with signs and roads of artisans, although you can intuit this behind it all: rising and falling tangled contorted, linked to movement and tortuosity. It is not even the Etruscan, Roman, or the first high Gothic Pistoia and then Medieval, illustrated according to quotations and shifts, stratifications and cataloguing of periods that refer back to the tradition of each urban muscle. His is the city of shadows on the bell towers, of aerial shots of the baptistery where the balustrades kiss the clouds. Radiating marble paving, bases of dry stones. So here is the Pistoia of Aurelio, like the body of a woman caressed by velvet eyes. The silvery aspect of the town – ancient and noble with remote beginnings – is diluted into planes, sweetened from its primary severity. His Pistoia is an embroidered town, radiant and kind: a golden book of light chimes with the bell for baptisms where the phases of the light are adapted to the rhythm of the seasons. The image is enlivened, whispers, diffuses: you feel the sultriness of July when it is about to rain, the shadows cast beneath the porticos, the cellar-like freshness that suddenly roars like a hurricane. You feel the glory of the extended south, its heat waves. Pistoia, lucis porta, porta aurea. Set apart accurately, highly civilised. A novel of living stone, between chamfering and twisting. Beautiful for its airy space, almost as though it were music."
- Paola Goretti
In Aurelio Amendola. Pistoia. People and Places, Gli Ori, 2020, p. 6