For all the destructive violence inherent in these virtuoso manipulations, his paintings are deconstructive compositions that make the historical pictorial legacy available to the contemporary viewer with the highest possible degree of sensuous energy. Samorì completes his paintings in the style of the Old Masters with the highest degree of precision, causing the interventions he subjects them to to be all the more painful: he distorts them, smears them with his hand, disfigures them with the palette knife, paints them over, spills paint on them, or like a torturer removes the half-dry skin of the uppermost layer of paint with a scalpel. 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.

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. The paintings by Nicola Samorì are full of sensuous energy. The individual works by Davide Pairone and Alberto Zanchetta.

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