Nicola Samori

Nicola Samori’s dark, Baroque-inspired oil paintings are skillful reproductions of classical portraits and still lifes on canvas, wood, or copper, purposefully destroyed to negate classical representation and question painting itself. His process entails “skinning” his painted figures with a palette knife or diluent, layering another image on top, and repeating the process until images fuse and signs of erasure and scratching dominate the reworked surface. Samori explains that exposing the inside of the paint by removing layers of “skin” with a scalpel reveals “a freshness and an intensity unknown in the outer tones.”