His figures emerge from the darkness of the pictorial space into the light with dramatic realism.

His compositions for the most part conform to Baroque chiaroscuro.

Samorì takes his subjects from art history: portraits, crucifixions, saints, still lifes, landscapes. What he shares with them is the idea of creating something new out of what already exists by means of artistic transformation. Lucio Fontana, with his slits and perforations, is his model, as are Gino de Dominicis or Michelangelo Pistoletto. Yet the painter from Romagna also has a leaning towards Italian postwar modernity and Arte Povera. The technical skills of the 35-year-old Italian can be measured against the Old Masters of the Renaissance or the Baroque period. Nicola Samorì has learned more from Holbein, Michelangelo, or Caravaggio than from his professors at the Accademia di Bologna. The Kunsthalle Tübingen invites the public to discover the paintings of this internationally aspiring Italian in his first solo museum exhibition. The 35-year-old artist arranges them like a Baroque master before partially destroying them again by intervening with a brush, palette knife, or scalpel. If you don’t mind these, if you feel you need the full dose of his Catholic deathiness, look him up on the Google.The paintings by Nicola Samorì are full of sensuous energy. So I’ve done my best to find works that are light on the deathiness. Still, even with all this creepy, I like what he does with the paint.

He’s in it, and I don’t think he’s pepping up any time soon. He’s been very consistently painting deathy-death paintings for years – not decades, he’s only in his late 30’s, but still.

And it’s not like there was a year or so where this guy got a little dark. I don’t know what it is exactly, but somehow this guy makes death just way too …deathy for me. I enjoy everything about these works except the death, and you know I loves me some death. I should title this post “The Least Macabre Paintings I Could Find by the Artist Nicola Samori.” I love his figurative works: the simplified compositions, the suggestions of movement and time, his paint application style, texture, articulation and decay – even his color palette, though admittedly it’s on the darker of the very dark Italian tastes.

Nicola samori fegefeuer purgatory