However his approach to his predecessors is not at all that of a devotee, one of awe and docile reverence but rather that of a ruthless mind who subjugates and engenders all forms, pushing them to their furthest extremes, their vanishing point, where “a form of exhausted, at-the-limit beauty is impressed in them”.
Whoever has some familiarity with the art landscape – no need to be a genteel connoisseur for that – will suddenly find striking similarities and powerful correspondances at stake between Samorì’s works and the most iconic figures of Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerism painting alike. Their skin flake off and their limbs are so much vividly reminiscent of open sores that one can’t help but pause to scrutinize their suffering, with painstaking attention, even with a hint of dark pleasure, unsure as to whether heal them or let them agonize slowly. They might bear an air of familiarity and déjà-vu at first sight, yet they reveal their real haunting nature at a closer inspection. The works succeed in materially exposing the sight beyond our seeing, upending the modernist argument of figuration as illusory.Vacillating between life and death, his macabre, liminal creations exist as remnants of an act of violence, of so to speak Erostratism, namely, the morbid drive to prolong oneself in time and become immortal through outrageous and irreversible acts. Christ’s deposed body covered in plastic communicates with a painting of the Christ child, in which the central character is covered over in wipes of paint and incarnated in a mere blotch of yellow. An unfamiliar female form with bulbous extremeties (Fondamenta della Carne) sits across from a fragmented butterfly collection (Abito indenne) with a copper underbelly. These paintings defend themselves in their darkness, cowering in a state of abject exhibitionism. Similarly we are observed by two other dark ovals eclipsing the colors and stories that lie beneath, pupils dilated to capacity against cold yellow walls. The admiral watches us, distracting our gaze as his index finger peels open the painting’s skin to reveal the blue of a sea. Samori’s reinterpretation of Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of Andrea Doria’s (D'Oria) dominates the room. Onyx draws concentric ovals, mineral plans that expand gradually from the tip of the nose. The microcosm centers three oval paintings around a stone head (Vertical Sea), a portrait that follows the natural geological formation of rock. The exhibition as a whole realizes a summa of Samori’s recent bodies of work.
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