Rome is a city of a thousand faces
Rome is the political capital of Italy, but also the center of Christianity, Rome is the city that brings with it all the contradictions and the beauty of the world.
Its formal freedom has become its most unique trait over the centuries, thanks to the urban, architectural and artistic interventions that layer the city through the millennia.
It is; therefore, worth introducing Nicola Samori’s exhibition in this context: in order to discover a pictorial / sculptural musical language in a rapid physical and mental evolution.
Because it is contact between form and matter, coming to life in all his works, that plays a key role in a new and powerful project for Monitor Gallery.
In works that are sometimes hectic and sometimes even a bit melancholic one can see sprinklings of both painting and sculpture – it is a case where there is both balance and contrast between the two.
Among the works you can see a few (such as Saint Peter in Hell or Roman Ax), that open new spatial portals, and gather in a way that mirrors the way the city itself collects all the madness and power of human history.
In this way Nicola’s difficult and methodological study undermines in every work that certainty which the viewer wants by effectively capturing a kind of dark anxiety that encloses a timeless oblivion.
And just as a composer builds his musical forms, Nicola with his “rooms of fire” contrasts the intensity of the sensitivity to disrupt with human restlessness. From here he moves to what is called the “crisis rooms” where wood in all its forms, the master of the room, morphs suddenly in the direction of painting, fusing a kind of painterly/sculptural form with a lyric impulse that attempts to flee from certainty.
In this must-see exhibition, you can hear all the silence in our lives, you can notice the opening of a gap between the intimate history of the altered pictures, and become aware of man’s search in attempting to comprehend the roots of our history.
The exhibition can decode a synchronicity between the city of Rome and the present time – there is a timeless break in this absurd era of which Nicola in these rooms (but not only) is its composer.
Lapo Simeoni
Courtesy Monitor Gallery Rome