Naples cannibale. Jeux d’échelle et Unterwelt dans l’art contemporain

This article examines scale variation as a key semiotic operator in contemporary artistic practice. Drawing on Goethe’s account of Naples and on theories of the sublime, scale is approached not as a proportional parameter but as a condition of perception, structured by the tension between measure and excess. This framework is applied to the analysis of Black Square by Nicola Samorì, a site-specific installation at the Fondazione Made in Cloister. The study shows how processes of enlargement and reduction affect regimes of visibility, reorganise the viewer’s perceptual position, and activate embodied forms of reception. By linking format, materiality, and reception, the article argues that scale functions as an enunciative praxis, through which the artwork produces a specific figurative configuration of incommensurability