In the Italian Pavilion of the last Venice Bienniale, only twelve artists were invited, each of whom had a reserved separate room all for him/herself and the set up of his/her works. The choice was partly disappointing: in some cases for the choice of artists who, even if still active, being quite old did not have much to say about the novelties of the Italian art scene; but sometimes because of the smallness of the message and of the works selected and exposed.

The only one to stand out for the complexity of the meanings and the strong visual impact of the works he proposed was Nicola Samorì.

Samorì's theme starts from a strong postmodernist base, where the legacy of Baroque and late sixteenth century art, a strongly rooted inheritance in every Italian and Western citizen, is reproposed in a crude and vandalous way, giving birth to very different purposes and reactions.

This is about skimming the canvases, burning the subjects, making them immaterial ghosts due to an abrasion or shredding them as wax. Almost an horror film effect, where not only the art recognizable in the figurative tradition that frames her undergoes a macabre and fierce alteration, but it also becomes the art of slashing and of the resulting significance.

What happens to uncared art, not restored, not seen or abandoned in storehouses and museum warehouses? Maybe it suffers the same fate as that proposed by Samorì, but in a less accelerated version. What happens to a tortured martyr a second time, besides in the image also in the painting or sculpture that depicts him? How do we recognize him? How long do we retain the memory of him?

Being an image with a known subject seen hundreds of times, how can we reconstruct it in our own memory?

The layout of the space dedicated to the artist in the last Biennial was organized as an old Renaissance pharmacy, a study of a scientist between alchemy and science where, however, everything was frozen by a macabre agent that disfigured it. Samori's sculptures also undergo the same treatment as physical abrasion and elision of the image that then needs to resort to memory to be able to recompose itself. A vanity always on the brink of rotting and ruin. Something that is not only related to the time it corrodes, but also to the human sense of crumbling.

The last great performance of this almost forty-year-old artist from Emilia Romagna was in the Anatomic Theater of Padua, a perfect frame of seventeenth-century impact and precise in bringing back in time the visitor and coordinate the subject of the picture with actuality in a gap of four hundred years of corrosion.

Samorì, like Roberto Ferri (whom we have already written about) and the Flemish Fabre, knows how to bring back into life subjects which are thought to be relegated to historical museums, and astonishingly place them in contemporary contexts. Perhaps there is an unconscious current of postmodernity in art, that adding to the 17th-century taste the violence of the twentieth century, has conjugated a kind of post baroque of the years 2000.

In the case of Samorì it is as if a caravaggesque subject was treated as a work by Alberto Burri with very powerful effects.