Flash in Naples, from the Superhero Portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat takes the most kinetic figure in the DC canon — a hero whose entire identity is built on speed — and places him against a lime green grid that stops everything dead. Two red figures occupy the image: one static and frontal, lightning bolt emblazoned across the chest, the body outlined in yellow against the grid; the other mid-stride to the left, limbs angular and exaggerated. IL FLASH is written in the centre in the Italian form of the name, and a yellow lightning circle sits top right. The grid holds both figures in a system of coordinates that movement cannot escape.

The Italian title is the work's first displacement. Basquiat travelled to Naples in the early 1980s and showed work there, navigating the particular experience of a young Black American artist being celebrated in European institutions while the culture that produced him remained largely indifferent to what he was saying. To rename the Flash in Italian — to plant an American pop mythology in a European city — is to ask what these symbols mean when they travel, and who they belong to once they arrive.

The superhero as a figure had been almost exclusively white in American comics throughout the decades Basquiat grew up reading them — a cultural dominant that presented power, speed, and authority in a form that systematically excluded Black bodies from its iconography. The Superhero Portfolio, across all four prints, is Basquiat's sustained examination of that mythology: not a rejection of it but a taking apart, the figures rendered with enough fidelity to be recognisable and enough distortion to make their construction visible. Flash in Naples, with its grid-bound figures and fractured name, is among the most concentrated expressions of that inquiry in the series.

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