Critics often focus on the violence of Samorì’s methods. There is certainly a macabre quality to seeing a beautiful woman’s face scraped away to the bone (or rather, the canvas). However, to label it merely "violent" is to miss the sensuality.
This creates a tension that is electrifying. The viewer is caught between admiring the technical virtuosity of the painting and confronting the existential horror of its destruction. It is a memento mori for the digital age—a reminder that all images, no matter how perfectly rendered, are subject to entropy.
To stand before a painting by Nicola Samorì is to witness a crime scene in reverse. It is a quiet, deliberate act of violence, executed not with malice, but with an almost surgical devotion to beauty. nicola samori
Samorì’s practice is often described as a "ceremony of systematic deconstruction". He uses technical mastery to replicate the Baroque and Renaissance aesthetics of artists like Caravaggio or Rembrandt, only to "attack" the surface.
Nicola Samorì is a contemporary Italian artist whose work is a haunting, physical dialogue with the weight of European art history. Born in 1977 in Forlì, Italy, he has become a master of "creative destruction," initially producing technically flawless reproductions of Old Master paintings only to violently dismantle them through "skinning," peeling, and scalping. Artistic Philosophy and Technique Critics often focus on the violence of Samorì’s methods
It is an act of iconoclasm that is paradoxically reverent. He destroys the image to save it from the banality of mere representation.
"I am not interested in the finished product," Samorì has said in interviews. "I am interested in the process of unmaking." This creates a tension that is electrifying
But the comfort of recognition is short-lived.
He uses a palette knife not to add paint, but to lift it. He scrapes, shaves, and excises sections of the dried paint. Sometimes, he scrapes the face down to the dark under-layer, leaving only a ghostly impression of the features. Other times, he folds the canvas before the paint dries, imprinting a shadow twin onto the surface, creating a distorted echo of the original subject. In his famous "ferri" (irons) series, he presses a heated branding iron into the wet paint, searing a void into the face of the subject.