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 Samori. 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 Ecorché (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. In this work, executed on a sheet of copper, Samori 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.
(A part of the essay Under the Skin written by the English curator and art critic Mark Gisbourne in the catalogue SOLO, presented by AMC Collezione Coppola)