Nicola Samori Contemporary Painting

Jay Gidwitz
Surrealism
Published in
4 min readJan 2, 2016

Nicola Samori paints renaissance-style painting and sculpture with a contemporary twist: portions of the images are disfigured. Through melting, scratching, or other forms of destruction Samori degenerates what could otherwise be conceivably a Rembrandt or Caravaggio. In this reversal of representational art, the work is not a window into another world — but the surface paint itself becomes part of the story as it displays the ruin of the image — melting or smeared across the canvas. Samori displays the highest technical skill in his oil paintings.

Nicola Samori examines the theme of obsession from a number of different perspectives: that of the human body, religion, science, and the obsession of the artist with his own work. In his new paintings and sculptures he references art historical and biblical representations of ‘the healing of the possessed’. Examples of such associations are Raphael’s “Transfiguration”, Jean-Martin Charcot, who “invented” the medical diagnosis of hysteria in his hospital in Paris in the late 19th Century, and Efisio Marini, an Italian scientist and physician who created rather unconventional sculptures from preserved corpses.

- Via nicolasamori.com

nicola_samori-16

The paintings of Italian artist, Nicola Samori, are full of sensuous energy. The thirty-five year old’s style is derived from the classical paintings of early renaissance masters. With the highest degree of precession, his figures emerge from the darkness of pictorial space into the light with dramatic realism.

Samori’s methodology is one that intertwines both violence and romance, which make his paintings all the more painful: He distorts them, smears them with his hand, disfigures hem with the palette knife, paints them over, or like a torturer removes the half-dry skin of the uppermost layer of paint with a scalpel. Yet, through this destructive deconstruction, his compositions have an eery sense of beauty and elegance. — Via Juxtapoz:

All art by nicolasamori.com

Discover more amazing artists at surrealismtoday.com

--

--