Samorì, focusing on the sacred as an ambiguous concept and on the unrepresentable, develops his art starting from the icons of the history of art, probing them, “profaning them” but paradoxically without disrespecting them: a material transformation is taking place that reveals us how the transcendent can escape us, not have a reassuring face to rely on, because we human beings often let ourselves be voluntarily enveloped by darkness, drowning in depths that we hope are suddenly illuminated by the light that we will see. The artist, like his creatures, sometimes feels comforted in thinking about himself as an involuntary man, therefore innocent, who paints and sculptures so as not to forget, because death, as Seneca said, always threatens, it is a present that at every moment conquers a larger portion of us. Samorì offers visitors a black monolith that constitutes his artistic production, made up of concepts and symbols from Baroque and Realist art, especially Spanish and Dutch, which are transformed into hyper-realistic figures that act as new models, because disease, decay, deformation, are tools for knowledge, a mystical practice, a vanity, from which no one escapes.

On the other hand, if it were not dark, it would not be either sacred or divine. The Ravenna-based artist Nicola Samorì fears death and the decay of faces and bodies and tells us so without too many mysteries, while trying to probe the unknowable, especially in relation to the sacred.

Nicola samori artist