You once said that a painting has many lives, ad nauseam, and this gives you the chance to challenge their limits by torturing them. Far from basking in ideologies of restoration and nostalgia, you put the past to death, thus exploring the notion of “resistance” which is linked to a question of memory, of living on (survivance, Aby Warburg’s Nachleben). We are transient beings contemplating the element of future, the element of permanence. To this end, not only he tries to revitalize an age-old, lofty legacy by infusing it with new blood and life, but he also tries to upend it completely, injecting it with fear and anxiety, two permeating forces in his work as much as in the history of humankind.īy creating fragmented and shattered scenarios, his paintings mark the moment when we finally abandon a strictly contemporary and nostalgic viewpoint and, as he says, “go hunting for evocative shreds”.ĪM: Whenever we are before an image, notably your images, we are before time, confronted with something that will probably outlive us. However murderous and deadly they might look, with all their bloody insides surgically exposed and skin ripped open, Samorì’s resilient creatures belong to life: even when nothing remains within themselves and every ounce of life has been brutally brought out, they scornfully appear almost as harmonious and serene as their original counterparts.ĭuring our long-lasting conversation, Samorì explained to me that a painting necessarily has to go through a downfall, a temporary eclipse of its nature, if it wants to “reincarnate” and come back to life again. However his approach to his predecessors is not at all that of a devotee, one of awe and docile reverence but rather that of a ruthless mind who subjugates and engenders all forms, pushing them to their furthest extremes, their vanishing point, where “a form of exhausted, at-the-limit beauty is impressed in them”. Whoever has some familiarity with the art landscape – no need to be a genteel connoisseur for that – will suddenly find striking similarities and powerful correspondances at stake between Samorì’s works and the most iconic figures of Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerism painting alike. Their skin flake off and their limbs are so much vividly reminiscent of open sores that one can’t help but pause to scrutinize their suffering, with painstaking attention, even with a hint of dark pleasure, unsure as to whether heal them or let them agonize slowly. They might bear an air of familiarity and déjà-vu at first sight, yet they reveal their real haunting nature at a closer inspection. Vacillating between life and death, his macabre, liminal creations exist as remnants of an act of violence, of so to speak Erostratism, namely, the morbid drive to prolong oneself in time and become immortal through outrageous and irreversible acts.
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