The Nature Of Fear Nicola Samori Link

Look at his series of Ecce Homo paintings. Christ is presented to the crowd: bleeding, crowned with thorns, mocked. But Samorì doesn’t paint the Christ of redemption. He paints the Christ of the second before redemption —the moment of pure, unheroic suffering. The flesh is mottled. The eyes are swollen shut. It is ugly.

Fear here operates through absence. You see the shape of a face, a hand, a torso, but the flesh is gone. You are looking at the —the empty shroud of a body that has dissolved in agony. The gold, instead of representing heaven, becomes a garish backdrop for oblivion. 3. The Inversion of Scale Samorì frequently paints on black, circular copper panels. The material is precious; the shape is intimate (like a cameo or a mirror). But the content is monstrous. Heads are twisted on spines. Mouths are frozen open in silent screams that never arrive. Because the works are small, you must lean in close. You cannot view them from a safe distance. the nature of fear nicola samori

Samorì takes this vocabulary and pushes it into seizure. He asks: What happens when the painting begins to decay while you are still looking at it? That is the nature of his fear: . The Anatomy of Samorì’s Fear Let us break down the specific mechanisms Samorì uses to bypass our intellectual defenses and attack the nervous system directly. 1. The Flaying of the Surface Most painters want to preserve the image. Samorì wants to destroy it. In works like Le Tentazioni di San Girolamo or his series of Saints , he applies thick layers of black, brown, and crimson oil paint. Then, while the paint is still wet, he scrapes it away with palette knives, spatulas, or even his fingernails. Look at his series of Ecce Homo paintings