Cannibal Trail - Nicola Samoli Solo Exhibition

Art is a hole in time, something that anesthetizes its course.

–Nicola Samorì

Cannibal Trail features works created during 2016 and 2019 by Italian artist Nicola Samorì. With these seemingly violent, peeled off and frail images, we trace the artist’s “cannibal and consuming” methods and path, through which he has destructed and reconstructed to devour the once glorious art of the West.

Baroque painting provides creative inspiration for Samorì. Embodying various influences, such as the disappearance of time, gravity and material deterioration, his painting sometimes seems incredibly charged and sometimes highly reserved; yet, they all finally arrive at a “cadaverous body.” His work enables us to treat the creative mechanism and process of painting as the real subject, which, after a long period of struggle, is only left with ruinous, vulnerable wreckages.

This exhibition focuses on the representation of “layers of skin”; that is, to explore the surface of painting and sculpture as if it comprises the whole. In Samorì’s work, the delineation of the “layers of skin” resembles a process of geological survey to unearth the sediments underneath. By destroying the surface and creating a superficial opening, the instantaneously severed sedimentary layers beneath are subtly revealed, allowing further exploration.

Samorì’s work, be it painting or sculpture, portrays the vulnerability of his image subjects, and at the same time, voices their uncompromising resistance. Sometimes the images are ruptured using stones and separated from the canvases, and other times, they are cut in half, peeled off with a scalpel or a chisel, eroded with sulfur, stripped off from walls, or repeatedly created out of or incorporated with natural fractures or openings on stones. Each experiment aims to investigate and grasp the ephemerality of the creative moment while generating a time-transcending dialogue with stones refined through hundreds of years. Part of Samorì’s daily creative process also includes employing irrevocable ways to destroy his images that are elaborately painted, which is considered a method to create an understanding of the fleeting relationship between material and time.