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presented by AmC collezione coppola
featured artist in this issue:
nicola samori’
No. 1 - MAY - MMXI
Transmutations as strong as a lion On nicola samorì by DANIEL J. SCHREIBER
chief curator at Tübingen Kunsthalle
‘It is our own power’, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes the gen-
ius, ‘unfolded in a childhood dream, and developed in youth until it is strong and agile like the mountain lion as he rushes on his prey’. The concept of genius from the Sturm und Drang period seems to have been tailor-made for Nicola Samorì. Did the Italian painter and sculptor not take the same path? Do the works by this graceful, reserved man not possess an aesthetic autonomy as strong as a lion? Born in 1977 into a farmer’s family with little interest in art, he dreamt of nothing else but art. He experienced as little support as he did interference from his family in the development of his talent. As a four-year-old, he shaped figures out of earth. Soon thereafter, he was already hewing them out of stone. When he moulded variations on David and painted an interpretation of The Last Judgement, he could not yet read, nor had he ever heard the name Michelangelo. Escaping the notice of those around him, the introverted boy could do what he wanted. He initially retreated into his bedroom in order to work. He then set up a studio in the tractor shed of his parents’ farm. No one minded that he painted its walls. Nothing stood in the way of the unencumbered development of his interests. At fourteen, he was already in a position to earn a living with his art. He sold paintings to his neighbours, friends of the family, and friends of friends. It was obvious that he would ultimately attend the Accademia di Bologna, and it was obvious that he would not learn much there. His teachers were not professors but the Old Masters he was familiar with from museums and books. After five years studying in the region’s capital, he returned to the open spaces. He set up shop, as it were, in a secularised Renaissance church in the small town of Bagnacavallo, a linear distance of only twenty kilometres from his parents’ home. He works in the nave, and he and his wife live in the church gallery. There is not another European country in which art history is as palpable as it is in Italy. It is perhaps for this reason that the desire to break with tradition which was so widespread in the twentieth century was particularly strong here. In the early 1950s, Lucio Fontana perforated and slashed open the conventional panel painting in order to open up space for environments. In the early 1960s, Piero Manzoni degraded high art to the rank of a lower metabolic process by having his own Merda d’artista canned. It would stand to reason to place the young painter Samorì in this iconoclastic line of post-war Italian modernism. Does he not direct a similarly enormous amount of destructive force against the traditional subjects of his predecessors? He distorts them, smudges them with his hand, scrapes away at them with a spatula, paints them over, spills streaks of paint over them, or, like a flaying torturer, uses a sharp knife to remove the half-dry, upper layer from a painted body. Yet what distinguishes him from his iconoclastic counterparts of the post-war modernist period? He does not share their notion of a revolutionary new beginning on a clean slate. He counters, ‘The more we
want to blot out the paintings of the past, the more forcefully they come back.’ For him, it is not about elimination, but about transmutation. The term is borrowed from alchemy and refers to refining processes, for instance the transformation of earth into gold. Samorì is familiar with it from Arte Povera, where it stands for the principle of transforming simple materials, such as stone, metal and wax, by means of artistic recomposition into valuable symbolic vehicles. Some artists from the Arte Povera circle apply this transmutative method to their treatment of art-historical source material. Gino De Dominicis, for example, takes up Leonardo da Vinci’s caricatural motifs in order to assign a new role to them in his pictorial narratives. Michelangelo Pistoletto reproduces fragments of Michelangelo’s sculptures in marble or polyurethane in order to combine them to create new figures. Both of them are concerned with singling out finds from our collective visual memory and submitting them to reinterpretation. In terms of the history of ideas, Samorì develops an individual way of dealing with the Old Masters on the basis of this recent Italian art history. A striking example of this is his oil painting Buen Retiro from 2010, in which he examines a painting by the Spanish-born Neapolitan, Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera. The efforts to portray St Paul the hermit in unvarnished naturalism are visible in Ribera’s painting of the aged man. Yet in his reinterpretation, Samorì is the first to succeed in transferring to canvas the old man’s feet covered with bluish translucent veins, sinewy legs, flaccid abdominal fat tissue, and waxy skin as realistically as Caravaggio, whom Ribera also aspired to emulate. Samorì’s interventions in composition seem all the more breathtaking. In Ribera’s painting, the hermit, who is sitting in a cave next to a book and a skull, raises his hands in prayer. In Samorì’s painting, the man’s head and hands are being so strongly sucked up by the stormy sky radiating into the cave that his back is in danger of breaking. The distortion of the body and its seamless transition into the sky become a distinct symbol for the hermit’s ascetic devotion to God and nature. Thus, while Samorì’s painting can be considered a technically improved new edition of Ribera’s painting, it can also be regarded as the translation of the theme inherent in the original into a form of expression that is immediately tangible to the senses in all of its freshness and drama. Samorì’s acts of artistic violence are thus to be understood more as interpretational achievements that reveal hidden placements immanent in the work and restage them in a dramatic way for the contemporary viewer. The painterly means he employs to do this are as different as the paintings he cites. He used a knife to maltreat a perfect replica of a portrait of a woman by Hans Holbein in such a way that her dress is hanging in shreds from her breast. He painted over her face with thick, light brushstrokes. Features of another woman’s face that Samorì borrowed from a fashion magazine have in part been inscribed into the top layer. Only a shoulder and an ear remain. In this way, Holbein’s lady regains a sensually erotic relevance, which was lost in the original portrait in the course of its five-hundred-year history of reception. One last example needs to be mentioned in this brief introduction: Reverso from 2010, an examination of the crucifixion by Giovanni Battista Crespi, a seventeenth-century, late-manneristic painter from Milan. Samorì coated his version with layers of black glaze. He then cut through the still semi-moist skin of paint along the contours of the crucified man, loosened it from the ground of the painting with a scalpel, and folded it downwards. The flesh now visible from reverse no longer covers a body. It hangs down in folds and radiates deathly pale. Christ’s sacrificial death is present in all of its ghastliness, and yet the dark vacancy left on the cross by the body of colour provides a space for contemplating the absence of the Son of God. Today, no one really believes in the artist as a ‘demigod’ or in his inherent ‘deepest feeling of truth and beauty,’ and so we will dispense with calling Nicola Samorì a genius in the spirit of Goethe. However, that his technical skills virtually effortlessly tie in with the high standard of painting of the Renaissance and the Baroque period, that he devotes himself to the Old Masters with vast knowledge and profound understanding, and, that by means of deconstruction, he makes their works available to today’s public with great sensuous force – this, with your permission, can very well be called simply ‘ingenious’.
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previous page: Buen Retiro 2010 Oil on linen 200x150 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
Dogs 2009 Oil on board 19x27 cm Private Collection Italy Dogs 2009 Oil on board 19x27 cm Private Collection Italy
J.R.S.R. (Simonia) 2009 Oil on linen 200x150 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
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J.V. 2009 Oil on wood 27x19 cm Private Collection Netherlands
La Recherche 2008 Oil on wood 21x17 cm Private Collection Italy S. Rosa 2009 Oil on wood 42x40 cm Private Collection Italy
Webbrown 2009 Oil on wood 29x17 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
Linacre 2009 Oil on wood 27x19 cm Private Collection Italy
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Agnese 2009 Oil on copper 100x100 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
Hans Holbein ĂŠcorchĂŠ (estasi) 2010 Oil on copper 100x100 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
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Nubifregio 2010 Oil on linen 200x150 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
A.F.P. 2010 Oil on wood 55 x 55 cm SĂ˜R Rusche Sammlung Oelde Berlin, Germany
Monk 2010 Oil on wood 40x30 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
Rapture 2010 Oil on linen 300x200 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
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Maddalena 2010 Oil on wood 70x50 cm AmC Collezione Coppola Lucrezia 2010 Oil on copper 70x50 cm Private Collection Italy
La Storia 2009 Oil on copper 100x100 cm Private Collection Italy
next page: Fracta Compositio 2010 Oil on linen 200x300 cm Private Collection Italy
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Reverso 2010 Oil on wood 70x50 cm AmC Collezione Coppola
The twentieth century’s high modernist criticism of figurative art was
that it was an ‘art of illusion’. This followed on from an earlier modernist argument ‘that a picture, before being a war horse, a nude, or telling some other story – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain pattern’.1 It led later to Greenberg’s famous argument about the autonomy of the picture surface, according to which painting is purely about its processes and whereby it is inevitably ‘in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at “abstract” and “non-objective art”’.2 The paintings of Nicola Samorì confound and reveal the fallacy of this traditional modernist argumentation. Instead of immediately assuming the privileged illusional aspect of Old Master works, he views the surface of the painting as a material skin – a process of applied layers of paint that are in themselves a kind of signified material–physical entity. Hence Samorì’s copying and transcribing different aspects of Old Master works, which are frequently (though not always) Baroque in origin, as well as his use of paint extends our knowledge of how bodily processes at work are depicted in painting, in other words, through the marks that are made and by extension to the natural maker of those marks.3 The use of a Baroque metaphor is particularly appropriate, for not only has it come to be seen in retrospect as the aesthetic ‘age of the body’ in visual art, but also as the beginning of the modern scientific age, when life and natural material bodily processes were first openly questioned and seriously observed.4 The corporeality of the body as skin and scourged paint structure (literally écorché), realised in terms of marks and memory as material ‘trace’, is central to the approach to painting undertaken by Nicola Samorì.5 His works express the inner life of painting both as a process and a material extension, and in so doing reveal his unique technique for revivifying the possibilities offered by traditional image-making. In a work called Hans Holbein Écorché (Estasi) (2010), the surface is quite literally a flayed space that has been materially transformed from its source image. The use of the term ‘ecstasy’ (in the philosophical sense of ‘outside-of-itself’) connotes at the same time the idea of a transformation that is both emotional and material.6 In this work, executed on a sheet of copper, Samorì has used the material references of past painting practices, while completely revivifying them in relation to the aesthetic painting realities of the present, comprising an increasingly self-reflexive and analytical understanding of what constitutes the conditions of picture-making. The idea of the painting always presenting a hidden visible (what you see is influenced by what you cannot see) is made explicit by Samorì. His work Reverso (2010), which is taken from a Crucifixion with accompanying saints at the foot of the cross, is an image where the artist has folded back and reversed the paint surface of the crucified Christfigure. Not only does this reveal the hidden surface layers of applied paint as it was systematically applied (the structural contents of painting), but inverts and revolutionises the iconography of the source at the same time. As St Peter was also crucified, but upside-down, the accompanying saint’s gesture of Ecce Homo (‘Behold the Man’), which usually refers to the divine incarnation, is able to point to an earthly set of human consequences that flow from its initial subject matter. The painting therefore translates not just the scourged materiality of the image (as an image), but reverses and reintegrates the violated humanity of its original motif.7 This approach by Samorì is not only relevant to works that have religious iconography, but also those such as A.F.P. (2010), which is taken from a little known northern-Italian eighteenth-century landscape source. The point to be stressed here again is that the source is not always significant in terms of the details Samorì might choose to take from the pre-existing image, and which in most cases is rarely fully transcribed. What is noteworthy in this instance and others is the subsequent intervention where the sky has been partly excoriated to reveal the dark ground, another feature common to late Renaissance and Baroque painting. The paint-like shreds of skin hang down in strands and rest or re-impose themselves across the sfumato landscape below. A similar approach is evident in a large work called Nubifregio (2010), which may or may not be a play on the Italian noun nubifragio meaning ‘downpour’ or ‘cloudburst’. Nonetheless it is extremely ap-
Under the skin: the paintings of nicola samorì by MARK GISBOURNE
Berlin-based curator and art critic
propriate to an image of St Jerome (the emaciated biblical scholar and Doctor of the Church) often associated with sites and events of natural phenomena and emotional revelations. The material idea of paint as application and erasure, integrated as it is into the historical processes of painting itself, is just as apparent in another Guerciniesque St Jerome called Buen Retiro (2010). In this case, as in several other works, there is a conflation of detailed precision (for example, the ‘vanitas’ skull) and hazy sfumare plus opaque blurriness, where the upper torso of the saint dissolves into the surface of the sky and landscape beyond. The Platonic cave setting and the distorted anatomy give the visual effect of a stretched and optical elasticity to the image. Yet the idea of blurriness as used by Samorì is always embedded in a materialised form of conceptuality, in other words, his ideas are always matter-driven; the use of material processes like the smear, stain, and smudge are integral to the very nature of the day-to-day painting practice. If it is the case, as has been argued elsewhere, that it is a form of deconstruction (some have called it dismantling), then it is one that is arrived at through the simple materiality of paint application and its subsequent manipulation.8 The same argument applies to what is called Übermalungen (overpainting) in German, where paint is applied to mask and alter the surface, while at the same time continually implying a pre-existing image. There is a whole series of smaller portrait studies in 2009 that deals precisely with this issue. In the small paintings called Dogs (2009), the idea is taken further in a witty anthropomorphic direction, recalling yet another tradition of distorted facial expression often found in the traditions of Baroque painting.9 The past for Nicola Samorì is a site of material eternal recurrence, which is never the return of the same, but a return wherein a new other has been invisibly inscribed. If anything, it is the past that must be remade anew in the present. The master works of the past, therefore, are not sources to be copied merely in and of themselves; that would be pointless and has so often been the error of imitative academic painting. Painting’s historical past is an epistemological reservoir of connected ideas and materialities, the contents of which have meanings that are constantly rethought and renewed. A painting like J.R.S.R (Simonia) (2009), for all its apparently theatrical baroque grandeur, is more of a resource concerning the material process of painting and artistic practices than it is about the seventeenth century in any real sense. This means that an emotional association and addition is further implied; an intention, if you like – something that has to be grasped and carried forward, and in so doing opening up all its possible material referents. To think otherwise would be merely to believe that all human bodies are essentially alike, when we know that every human body is intrinsically different (with non-repeatable DNA). Both the general and the more specific features of Nicola Samorì’s paintings show that this is clearly not the case – history is not just the cobwebbed
site of past memorialised events, but also grounds the conditions that shape a future set of possible realities for his painting; the acts of memory and remembering always take place in the present and not the past. The former teleological fallacies of modernism have come to an end, and every painting today is (or should be) a question about what the parameters and possibilities of painting really are in the contemporary world. But if paint remains the dominant (but not only) medium of creating pictorial expression today, it does so because of its fundamental material properties. That is to say paint still has the power to generate a state of introspection and personal reverie in a painter, a positive and creative state of being that necessitates its continued use. 1 Maurice Denis, ‘Définition du Néo-traditionisme’, Art et Critique, Paris (23–30 August 1890), printed in translation in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas 1815–1900. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998; (pp. 862–69) p. 863. 2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ (1940), in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1 Perceptions and Judgments 1939–44. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1986; (pp. 5–22) p. 8. 3 Nicola Samorì, Being. Poggibonsi: Carlo Cambi Editore, 2009. 4 The term ‘seventeenth-century scientific revolution’ was first coined by Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) and extended by Alexandre Kojève (1902–68), and lies behind Thomas Kuhn’s famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1962. 5 In English the word écorché (derived from the French nineteenth-century painting tradition of the Academy) means quite literally ‘flayed’, and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) recommended that the underlying anatomical structure of the body should be expressed prior to it being given its final form as a figurative depiction. Samorì takes this idea further, seeing the actual materiality of paint as the real ‘body and structure’ of the painting. It bears a truth to painting while simultaneously acknowledging the subsequent aspects of figurative illusion.
6 Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Paintings on Copper, 1575–1775. Phoenix Art Museum and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 7 The words Ecce Homo (‘Behold the Man’) were used by Pontius Pilate (John 19:15), after the scourging or flagellation of Christ. A scourge is a flail or multistranded lash used in corporal punishment or self-flagellation in which the skin surface is intentionally violated and ruptured. The old word in Italian is scoriada (more commonly today flagello), in turn derived from Latin excoriare meaning to flay and corium which means to skin. In this sense Samorì’s painting surface has been ruptured and skinned; the word écorché comes from the same Latin etymological root meaning ‘to skin’. 8 See Ian Rosenfeld, ‘Nicola Samorì And the Dismantling of the Portrait’, and Rachel Spence, ‘Nicola Samorì: A Conceptual Artist Who Uses the Language of Old Masters’, in Nicola Samorì: la mutabilità del passato ê il dogma centrale. Galleria Napolinobilissima: Naples, 2009; pp. 7–20 and 37–51. 9 Charles Le Brun (1619–90), as the official court painter of Louis XIV, wrote and developed extensive theories on the interchangeable relationship of human and animal physiognomy for the use of painters. See Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.
NICOLA SAMORi’ Born in Forlì, 1977 Lives and Works in Bagnacavallo, Italy
‘Every well-established language is the embodiment of a ghost that never ceases to push out the shape from within even when its image seems to be complete. I reconstruct the outcomes of the trials that have characterised these different seasons and I shake them while their bodies are still soft. None of these actions is an over-painting; each act is a re-writing conducted with after-the-fact wisdom, as if Holbein had made a deal with Appel in Ribera’s shadow.’
colophon ESSAYS BY: DANIEL SCHREIBER, MARK GISBOURNE // TRANSLATION BY: REBECCA VAN DYCK AND NICOLA MORRIS // PHOTOGRAPHY BY: ROBERTO BIGANO // GRAPHIC CONCEPT AND LAYOUT: WWW.UP3.IT // SPECIAL THANKS GO TO: ANDREA ZANELLI, ERIKA NANNINI, CHRISTIAN EHRENTRAUT, PATRIZIA RAIMONDI, ENRICO GATTI, JESSICA COPPOLA, ISABELLA COPPOLA, BIOMAX SPA, 9 MACHINE // ALL RIGHTS FOR THE WORKS BY THE ARTIST: © 2009–2011 NICOLA SAMORÌ // © 2011 DANIEL SCHREIBER // © 2011 MARK GISBOURNE // ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO COPY OR REPRODUCE ANY PART OF THESE CONTENTS. PRINTED IN ITALY
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