Nicola Samori, Onoufrios (2011) - Oil on wood

Samorì’s works often refer to Italian 17th century painting by the selection of motives as well as by his painting technique. Still lifes, portraits, devotional paintings and landscapes develop through enormous technical skills over a long span of time and through numerous layers of paint on copper, wood or canvas. But Samorì withholds the imaginary „finished“ painting from us and reverses the process of origin drastically: He purposely destroys the image surface, attacks selected parts with a palette-knife, with diluent or with his bare hands until he tears off the (oil-)skin from his painted figures. Physicalness and the body are most important for Samorì’s paintings and the process of skinning stresses this importance. Samorì builds up his „body of work“ with an abundance of art-historical references and masses of paint just to forcefully destroy them. By focusing on the materiality and artificiality of the image, Samorì negates classical represenation and questions painting itself.
To prepare for his first German solo exhibition at Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Samorì moved his studio from Italy to Berlin temporarily. All works for „Imaginifragus“ were finished in Berlin.