Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore. 1654) is decorticated and draped across the canvas: The savior’s body becomes its own burial shroud.

In Lienzo, 2014, the image of an attenuated, supine Jesus (based on Philippe de Champaigne’s The Dead Christ, ca. He departs from the periphery of the face and peels away in concentric circles until he reaches the eye of the depicted young girl, stripping the portrait of its classical figurative function. In Testa con lacrima (Head with Teardrop), 2017, he wields an engraver’s knife and flays off the oil paint, applied to the canvas only two or, at most, three days before. Samorì engages in an informel-style dance with his materials. The second floor is host to paintings and sculptures created by Samorì from the discarded scraps from other works (for example the extraordinary Idolo anemico, 2016), as well as more recent pieces that employ onyx in order to play with the stone’s imperfections, such as Lucia, 2019, a picture of the holy protector of sight with two geodes instead of eyes. The Carraccis’ scene of Aeneas genuflecting before a statue of Apollo presides over Samorì’s Marsyas in Cammino Cannibale (Cannibal Trail), 2018-19, a cycle of six frescos, each one detached from its predecessor and tampered with by the artist. The first floor of the exhibition is dominated by a dialogue between his work and the friezes in situ. The artist’s recent statement-“I breed and torture images”-captures the dialectic at play in his work: Through a constant dialogue with materials, he dismantles in order to create anew. Plundering masterpieces from the past, particularly from the seventeenth century, Samorì reclaims subjects beloved by art history and distresses, disfigures, and strips away their surfaces.

The approximately eighty works gathered in Palazzo Fava for “ Sfregi” (Scars), Nicola Samorì’s first major retrospective in Italy, offer a baroque, nonlinear journey through techniques of construction and deconstruction, ruination and transformation, skillfully developed over the past twenty years. He has also had solo exhibitions abroad in institutional spaces such as the Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art in Taiwan, the Neue Galerie in Gladbeck, the Center for.

Nicolas samori art