Enigmatic and classically beautiful, his paintings tell half stories and are wonderfully dramatic in their pose, chiaroscuro lighting and atmosphere. Each delicately painted image is defaced by glutenous gloops, scratches or vicious brushes of raw paint, systematically destroying the work underneath. Samori’s Baroque influence is plain and skilfully referenced in his elegant work which ignores contemporary subjects in favour of classical faces, bodies and clothes. Like, for example, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin or the sculptor Adriana Varejão, Samori occupies the Grand Guignol corner of the contemporary artworld-with its interest in shocking, and deformity and body parts-an area related to the grotesque.Nicola Samori’s incredible deconstructed interpretations of classical compositions simultaneously preserve a deeply familiar and intrenched technique of painting and physically destroy it’s rules and conventions. In this way, these works reject not only art but also anti-art, including themselves. These works can be seen as an attack on a specific period of art, or they can be more widely interpreted as a ferocious dismissal of all types of art, sweeping the whole concept of art practice to one side. Sometimes he also removes the faces of portraits from other supports and attaches them flipped over on to new heads to create voided 'holes' as in Il veleno nelle ombre (2010).

The wounding is assisted by his admiration for modernist artists like Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, who are known for 'mutilating' basic painting support materials, and also his interest in moulage, where he creates hideous skin diseases or injuries. It is an emotional and physical attack on the cumulative weight of art history pressing down on contemporary European artists, believing in the power of 'irresponsibility' and 'wounding' to hit back-a retaliation in search of freedom. Samori ridicules those civilised painted images by turning them into objects of pity or revulsion, as evidenced by Seer (2011), Agnese (2009), June 27 (crowned) (2014), and Ciclope (2020). He specialises in a form of aggressive baroque art that humiliates the neoclassical tradition exemplified by 17th-century Old Masters in the Netherlands and Bologna.

Art by nicola samori