The Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro in Naples dedicates a major exhibition to Mimmo J odice’sonly color work with the exhibition Il colore di Mimmo Jodice, produced and organized by D’Uva in collaboration with the Mimmo Jodice Studio and curated by Sylvain Bellenger. The exhibition offers the public a rare and partly unpublished nucleus of color photographs taken by Jodice, the only color project of his career, dedicated to masterpieces of 17th-century Neapolitan painting. The works were recovered and produced again thanks to the initiative of D’Uva srl, the brainchild of Francesca Ummarino and Ilaria D’Uva.
Visible from May 17, 2026 to January 10, 2027, the exhibition aims to be a major exhibition tribute dedicated to the artist after his passing. The project, which Jodice himself had begun working on, brings attention back to a lesser-known but fundamental chapter of his photographic research.
The official presentation of the exhibition took place on May 15 in the presence of Francesca Ummarino, director of the Museum of the Treasure of San Gennaro, Abbot Prelate Real Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Riccardo Carafa d’Andria, Deputazione Real Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Sylvain Bellenger, curator of the exhibition, Barbara Jodice, Mimmo Jodice Studio, Ilaria D’Uva, CEO D’Uva srl, and Brunella Trimarco, Fondazione Tridama.
The exhibition brings together more than forty works, some never exhibited before, distributed among the Treasury rooms and Sacristies of the museum complex. The installation aims to relate photography, painting and the museum’s historical heritage to offer an intense tribute to one of the artists who most profoundly told the story of Naples through a rigorous, essential gaze, far from any stereotypical representation.
The opening of the exhibition also coincides with the renovation of the museum’s reception spaces, restored by D’Uva to a design by Vanni del Gaudio, and created by Lavaggi&Montella and WorkinArt by Paolo Gambardella and Luigi d’Amore. The new spaces house the ticket office and bookshop, redefining access to the monumental complex and contributing to the larger project of redeveloping the porticos of Via Duomo. At the same time, the new lighting system designed by lighting designer Filippo Cannata is also inaugurated, realized with the support of the Campania Region under the PR Campania FESR 2021-2027 program - Priority Axis 1, RSO1.3, Action 1.3.1 - Public Notice for the support of the development of cultural and creative enterprises).
Known for his strict black and white, Mimmo Jodice made these color photographs in the 1980s during visits to the exhibition La Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, curated by Raffaello Causa at the Capodimonte Museum. On that occasion the photographer focused his attention on the details of works by artists such as Jusepe de Ribera, Francesco Guarini, Caravaggio, Luca Giordano, Filippo Vitale, Battistello Caracciolo and Artemisia Gentileschi. Faces, hands, fabric folds and seemingly marginal fragments are isolated from their original context and transformed into suspended images in which color and light take on a whole new emotional and analytical force.
The photographs, originally presented in 1985 in the exhibition Un secolo di furore at Villa Pignatelli, have undergone a major restoration curated by Barbara Jodice and Marco Spatuzza, which has also made it possible to recover previously unpublished images of the artist. From this work emerges a production of extraordinary visual intensity that has long remained on the margins of the best-known part of Jodice’s oeuvre. In these photographs, color does not play a descriptive function, but becomes an emotional and interpretive tool, capable of transforming the pictorial material into a contemporary experience.
The installation designed by WorkinArt based on an idea by Sylvain Bellenger creates a direct dialogue between the photographs and the Treasure of San Gennaro through the use of neo-Baroque fabrics and velvets made especially for the exhibition. The design of the fabrics was supervised by Maddalena Marciano, professor of costume at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Giuseppe Ambrosio and students from the costume course at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts.
The itinerary builds an immersive dialogue between the Baroque chromaticism of the Tesoro and Jodice’s photographic gaze. The great compositions of seventeenth-century painting are reinterpreted in a new visual dimension, where photographic realism opens up to contemporary imagery.
To visit the exhibition, it will also be possible to participate in the special SCINTILLARTE itinerary, a project of solidarity tours led by young people with disabilities from the association La Scintilla, a reality linked to Pio Monte della Misericordia and a partner of the museum since 2022. The initiative includes an integrated ticket valid for both museums.
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalog co-edited by D’Uva and Paparo Editore, with contributions by Luca Massimo Barbero, Sylvain Bellenger, Stefano Causa, Erri De Luca, Ilaria D’Uva, Angela Jodice, Maddalena Marciano, Mario Martone and Francesca Ummarino.
The exhibition was organized under the patronage of the Campania Region and the City of Naples, with the support of Fondazione Tridama, Mulino Caputo, Grimaldi Lines, D’Amico and Caronte spa.
Hours: Daily from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. (last entry 45 minutes before closing)
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| Naples, Mimmo Jodice's only color work on display at Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro |
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