ZIAN Gallery is delighted to present Nicola Samorì: Thrust, opening on 7 November in Hangzhou. Showcasing a new body of paintings, the exhibition delves into the delicate tension between materiality and spirituality, decay and renewal, and the organic and human imprints that define Samorì’s practice. This exhibition marks his first solo presentation at ZIAN Gallery and in mainland China.
The act of creation has always been fundamental to the human experience. Through image-making, humans give form to thought, memory, and desire, translating the invisible currents of life into tangible expression. When this creative impulse is stilled, the unarticulated accumulates, gathering weight and tension, leaving the spirit stagnant. Through the act of making, humans inscribe dignity, beauty, and aspiration into the material world, shaping paintings, sculptures, and architecture as vessels of presence and spirit. Each work becomes a testament to the sublime persistence of human imagination, a dialogue between hand, mind, and the wider cosmos. Yet throughout history, this cycle has never been unbroken: humans have repeatedly destroyed and dismantled the very traces that carry their sublimity, obliterating the marks of their own ingenuity. And yet, from these remnants, new forms inevitably emerge, a perpetual rhythm of degeneration and rebirth that defines the human endeavour.
Daniel’s Degeneration takes its point of departure from a still life by the Flemish Baroque painter Daniel Seghers. In this painting, Samorì reimagined the pictorial surface with drastically subdued tones and staid gesture. He violently pierced into the painting’s skin, reaching into it until the still-soft oil pigment began to ooze out to expose the very essence of the subject, just as the gesture of St Thomas putting his finger into Jesus’ wound. The drama unfolds in the bleeding colour of the flowers, where revelation and matter converge. Through this sacred touch, Samorì reanimates the painting’s body: it does not merely depict the flower but enacts the very process of flowering, embodying the cycle of degeneration and renewal.
In The Stainless Pure series, idealised faces inspired by Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio merge with AI-generated imagery drawn from personal photographs, classical sculptures, and Baroque portraiture. Each work is painted on marble—Carrara white or Portuguese pink—within which a geode pulses through the stone’s fissures, like flesh exposed from a geological wound. The series inherits the idealisation of Renaissance form while reimagining it through a postmodern lens, where technology, warfare, and contradiction coalesce into an ambivalent body. The icons of Western art appear eroded, their sanctity fractured—yet from this decay, new standards and forms of life emerge, much like the geode bursting from the stone’s surface.
In Flagello, executed in oil on copper leaf applied to wood, the flayed surface of the figure evokes the fragility of human skin and the trauma inscribed upon it. The gleaming metal attaching above introduces an inorganic chill, a subtle separation of spirit from flesh—as if sublimity itself had ascended beyond materiality. By contrast, The Garden Flame draws from Baroque garden sculpture, dissolving its classical composure into a vibrant, molten flux. Its liquified figures seem to rise from soft, dissolving pigments like smoke—a fleeting apparition shaped by intuition and immediacy. Here, Samorì relinquishes control, allowing form to consume itself in the act of becoming, sculpting presence out of intangibility.
