A flower always foretells an end. By looking at it, time and its condition are unveiled. The bursting of the bud, the blossoming of the flower and the shedding of the petals illustrate the unavoidable cycle of all living things. When we look at the flower, we also see ourselves.

Nicola Samorì’s Flores exhibition at Monitor sheds light on mortality and decay by reminding us of the human body and its ephemeral nature. Using chiaroscuro on marble or wood, the artist meticulously paints life-like figures that are then eroded or etched into the supporting surface. The result is works alluding to a decaying process that brings the image to a tipping point where beauty and destruction meet.

In using destruction and wear and tear as an aesthetic language, Samorì tackles the theme of memory and oblivion. Tangible and hard-to-reach figures weave dialogues between continuity and decay, as if they were on the verge of fading away into obscurity. The paintings recall Renaissance and Baroque icons whose bodies (especially their faces) have been wilfully spoilt. Deterioration brings them closer to ruin in a present flooded with images, binding them to time, to yesterday.

When painting on marble, the artist builds tension between the unchanging solidity of the stone and the fragility of the human figures. Marble, traditionally known for its permanence and monumentality, contrasts with the wear and tear and fleeting condition of the figures. The surface is marred by processes that erode the painting, scarring and wounding the stone and bringing it closer to flesh. The corroded face, broken down into a rough, uneven texture, alludes to an open wound, exposing the inner layers of the work and the hidden layer beneath the surface. Marble thus overturns the two-dimensional nature of painting and forges a bridge between the ephemerality of the human body and the everlasting materiality of stone – a bond between heat and cold, flesh and mineral.

Nicola Samorì deliberately sets out to achieve images impervious to completion and perfection. The works are not set in idealism, but in the passing condition of flesh, which, like a flower, is conceived, blossoms and decays.

Samorì’s motifs recall the contemporary fixation on digital permanence and the preservation of the self. In a world where the self-image is extensively constructed and controlled, the artist revives the unavoidable fact that all representation carries: the subtle foreshadowing of one’s own deterioration. Or, as Óscar Faria writes on the exhibition text, Nicola Samorì’s ‘work is about this waiting for death. Christ’s open wound, as painted by Antonello da Messina; the cut made by Fontana in the monochrome grey of Concetto spaziale, Attesa, 1960; the incisions or grafts that Samorì does in his pieces: all illustrate this waiting for a time that must come.”

Flores reminds us that each image, each flower and each body bears, from its very start, an omen of its own end.

The exhibition is on display at Monitor until November 23, 2024.