1. What exactly is Flame Abstraction?
Flame Abstraction was born long before the award. It’s one of the first images where my way of working —Mediterranean light, camera movement, colour saturation pushed to the edge— found an almost classical balance: a single burning mass floating in a field of warm mist. There is no horizon, no tree, no clear reference. Only what truly interests me remains: energy. The image is built from a long exposure of eight seconds, a soft handheld travelling into the scene, and a conscious decision not to “correct” the excess but to embrace it.

The result is a kind of kinetic painting: a fire that doesn’t belong to any specific landscape, but to an interior — the camera’s, the sensor’s, the memory’s.

2. ND Awards and abstraction in photography
The ND Awards are one of the international competitions where abstract photography has a clear home within the Fine Art category. There you find minimal landscapes, geometric architecture, digital experiments, and, increasingly, images that approach painting without denying their photographic origin. For Flame Abstraction to be selected as an Honorable Mention in Fine Art: Abstract simply means that this kind of abstraction —baroque, luminous, emotional— can compete on the same ground as colder, more conceptual or minimalist approaches.It’s not a gold medal, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s a quiet sentence written in the margin of the map:

“This language exists, and it has a place in the international conversation.”

3. Luminous Mediterranean: a flame without heavy allegory
In fact, Flame Abstraction was not born as a big allegory, but as a nearly pure exercise in Mediterranean luminism. The metaphor here is very light: no explicit narrative, no closed symbol. What dominates is the physical sensation of southern light: heat condensed into an orange core, a dense, almost volcanic atmosphere, and a soft surrounding where edges dissolve. It is an image born from the Mediterranean I’ve been working with for years: not the sea itself, but its chromatic temperature. The camera moves, the exposure stretches, and what remains is not a story but a state: suspended light, as if the sun had left a trace of itself hanging in the air. In other series the allegorical discourse is more explicit; here the gesture is simpler and more honest: letting the light speak almost on its own, without forcing it to mean everything.

4. Technique

Flame Abstraction
Year of capture: 2022
Intentional Camera Movement — long travelling
Long exposure into the scene, handheld, minimal digital processing aimed at colour balance and soft contrast.