Nicola Samorì
La Bocca Di Berlino
2 May - 7 June 2025
Opening: Friday, 2 May, 6 – 9pm
Central to Nicola Samorì’s work is the idea that the most visceral way to ignite the experience of pleasure in art is by the shock of cruel depictions that get under the skin, an aspect of human nature that has intensely occupied art theory since antiquity. Samorì’s painstaking painterly handling of the epidermis of baroque images creates a sensuously dense foil for his artistic probing of the emotional and aesthetic depths of this unsettling subject.
Here the tragic figure of the mythical Marsyas appears like an overture to a drama of carnal suffering, his body inverted with Pan’s goat legs and mouth agape in a scream as he suffers the torture of being flayed alive. The tale of his audacious challenging of Apollo, leader of the Muses, to a contest is a parable about the hubris of men who seek to control art through technical skill.
Marsyas’s ignominious punishment is at the same time a castigation of the Dionysian principle that seeks to unleash the spiritual through ecstatic sensuality.
His naked body presented to us resembles a fallen Laocoön, the ancient pathos figure of physical pain par excellence. In the painting we see Marsyas’s skinned phallic knee, the very hinge point of his hybrid nature, standing out blood-red against the surrounding murk to great effect, and we can almost hear his howled words as recounted by Ovid: “Why do you peel me out of myself?”
Samorì deviates from Jusepe de Ribera’s model by omitting Apollo, the god to whom Marsyas addresses his question and whose hand penetrates the satyr’s flesh as he vivisects his thigh, thus excluding the specific action of mutilation and its moral lesson in order to have the viewer enact it in the painting.
Apollo’s swirling and billowing mantle, the darkening of its pinkish tone on its lower surfaces taking on the flesh tone of Marsyas’s tortured body, is now liberated to develop its own dynamic; the god’s physical violence is withdrawn and transformed into a sublimating, soothing pathos form.
Floating over the naked body and embracing its outline, the spectacular descent of the divine mantle foreshadows the shroud—and thus death—of Marsyas. Marsyas gazes at us, his eyes wide with fear as he offers his open throat in the nearmost pictorial plane, which we observationally penetrate as we experience his torture in the exposed, vulnerable fleshliness of his body.
In Samorì’s installation, the image of Marsyas located pro-fanum, “in front of the sacred sector,” functions as an entry figure guiding us into the cella beyond, where his animalistic wail of pain sculpturally transforms to become a supinely rotated sphinx. Raised up as a central cult image, the creature’s contorted position suspended in the air evokes her suicidal plunge in response to Oedipus’s solving of her riddle with the word “man.” She clearly seems to be stricken with human carnality: the redness of the Collemandina marble again evokes the idea of a flayed body, while her twisted and curved form evinces “tortura” in the truest sense of the word.
A series of painted stone slabs along the walls enclose the central scene, surrounding it like an ancient chorus, visibly distanced in order to formulate a variety of responses: they offer a spectrum of devotional images, with Christ as the Man of Sorrows (in the sense of “Ecce Homo”—“Behold the Man!”) flanked by various representations of mourners expressing deep compassion. Near these are found visually censored naked torsos and virtual bodies violently torsioned through the intervention of artificial intelligence, as well as floral still lifes whose flowers are formed by exposed areas of bare stone. Compassion materializes on the rock as eroded channels seemingly opened up by the action of blood, sweat and tears, or cracks suggestive of white handkerchiefs held by the female mourners to their faces. This contrasts with images intricately reversing the relationship between figure and ground, and with images where the visibilityof sexual organs is concealed, thereby shifting the viewer’s pleasure from seeing to the idea of touching.
This irritating pictorial contrast corresponds to the split in the didactic motivation behind cathartic aesthetics of cruelty, which since antiquity has oscillated between inurement and sensitization. While the sphinx, isolated in pain, releases a terror-triggering perturbation, the chorus responds with socially controlled, de-potentiating emotional regulation: the facial expressions of the empathizing figures who “suffer with” others (including Christ) reflect the tragic emotion of passio/compassio, while the censored lower bodies address the renunciation or deferral of pleasure and the still lifes demonstrate the apathy of beauty.
According to Samorì, his stone pictorial fields function like teeth defensively surrounding the sphinx that is a transfiguration of Marsyas’s tongue. Arranged in double rows and thus representing a closed mouth, their defense consists in capturing the viewer’s invasive gaze, for each of the slabs keeps at the ready a moment of magic able to shift the desire to see from the imagined figure to the material ground as the actual basis of the image’s corporeality. Viewed up close, the causal connection between the streaming tears and their apparent dissolutive action on the stone is upended: it is cracks and cleavages of the stone that induce the representational materialization of an interiority which, as a gash in the depiction, appears to work from within its embedding in the stone’s physical structure to determine the affective animation of the image.
Some of the stone slabs have no overpainting at all, emphasizing the pure potentiality of the material itself. These empty pictorial fields unmistakably present themselves as teeth, although afflicted with rot: dark spots suggest ghostly facial apparitions that seem to retreat into the rock and disappear; slabs broken in two serve to frame outlines, thus incorporating absence into the image series.
Leonardo da Vinci famously recommended the nebulous appearance of maculate rocks as a surface on which to mentally project imagined landscapes and figurative scenes, a recommendation that was ultimately put into literal practice in the following centuries by painting onto stone itself. Although Samorì explicitly references this tradition by choosing variegated stone slabs as a pictorial ground, in areas where he leaves the stone exposed no images come to mind; we cannot project anything onto them because they are blind spots, even open wounds, in the representation. And yet the natural fractures caused by their mineral composition turn the inner “flesh” of the stone outward and awaken in the viewer a sensation of tactility, a realization that creates an intimacy with the gaze of the artist. Even though these fields are unworked by the artist’s hand and thus untouched, they draw us into a purely sensuous experience that not only existed at the beginning of the work, but also fundamentally determined the work’s emergence.
Nicola Samorì’s true pictorial narrative is not about free figural invention, but rather how he makes his manipulation of the underlying pictorial material perceptible to the senses by means of the form-giving processes of sculpture and painting.
By letting our gaze run aground, so to speak, Nicola Samorì tames our human fascination with images that get under the skin. Elevating lesions in the picture support so that they become the generative nucleus of his pictorial motifs opens up for the viewer the associative possibility of inscribing their own consciousness of human vulnerability into these ruinous passages. The relationship between ground and figure is thus reversed. In the very moment when the stone is experienced in this way and thereby metaphorically enlivened, the petrifying effect of the external shock melts away so that the beauty of the works’ visual imagining of suffering can internally unfold.
Nicola Suthor
Professor in the History of Art, Yale University
Translation by Lisa Lawrence