At the beginning of the twentieth century a fracture opens up in the history of art. With Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso this shift emerges as a true watershed in the construction of the image, painting breaks the illusionistic pact of three-dimensionality and is forced to confront its own material condition without any remaining protective screens. It is within this displacement that the Renaissance paradigm of the perspectival window theorized by Leon Battista Alberti enters into crisis, and painting ceases to function as a transparent diaphragm onto the world, asserting itself instead as an autonomous presence, a reality that occupies space, surface and time, assuming the character of an image-object, to use Jérôme Baschet’s term.
Nicola Samorì, “Classical Collapse”, installation view, Cripta, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milano, ph. credits: Roberto Marossi fotografo, courtesy Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
It is from this awareness, rather than from any generic link between the ancient and the contemporary, that Classical Collapse, the exhibition of Nicola Samorì at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, Alberto Rocca and Eike Schmidt, and conceived as a unified project in dialogue with the Museo di Capodimonte, should, I believe, be read. The artist’s dialectical position unfolds on this same ground, if modernity has decreed the end of painting as a window, Samorì returns to the Western figurative tradition not to revitalize it but to push it toward a point of collapse, as if it were still a living body, or rather a grammar of skin subjected to tension. From this perspective the now withered rhetoric of art as a “bridge between tradition and innovation” reveals its full inconsistency, reduced to a tired slogan functional to press releases and the mechanisms of the cultural industry. Here tradition is neither celebrated nor salvaged but, without iconoclastic intent, taken up as matter to be put under pressure, incised and dissected, like a body stripped of its aura and returned to its bare operativity.
Nicola Samorì, “Classical Collapse”, installation view, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milano, ph. credits: Roberto Marossi fotografo, courtesy Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
Samorì’s paintings and sculptures originate from historical iconographic references intercepted through photographic reproductions, catalogue images and isolated details. From these materials the artist reconstructs the pictorial image anew according to the technical and iconographic codes of tradition, only then opening a second and decisive phase of the work, in which the figurative film is treated as pure matter. Within this process Samorì draws on a deliberately broad, almost encyclopedic iconographic repertoire, with a privileged though not exclusive attention to Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque painting, and with an obsessive insistence on the rendering of flesh, skin and matter, understood not as vehicles of representation but as operative surfaces of work. The image is first constructed with rigor and control and only subsequently forced, incised, lifted, abraded, bent, as if the pictorial surface were a skin subjected to torsion. It is at this stage that painting loses its illustrative function and begins to behave as an image-object, exposed to time, matter and the possibility of collapse.
Nicola Samorì, “Classical Collapse”, installation view, Corridoio del Bambaia, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milano, ph. credits: Roberto Marossi fotografo, courtesy Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
In recent works such as Flower Machine (2025), exhibited in the Sala Federiciana, this process also involves artificial intelligence, digital models generated from Flemish still lifes and photographs of dried flowers are fully translated into oil painting on panel and subjected to the same regime of construction and erosion that traverses the artist’s entire practice, between painting and sculpture. This same logic of construction and erosion informs Trabaccante (2025), in which painting is built with an almost obstinate technical precision through the use of oil on copper according to historically codified procedures. On copper, a smooth and non-absorbent surface, the pictorial layer can be incised and lifted before drying, detaching itself in continuous blocks and collapsing under its own weight.
Nicola Samorì, “Classical Collapse”, installation view, Sala del Cartone, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milano, ph. credits: Roberto Marossi fotografo, courtesy Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
In the “Legni” exhibited in the crypt and in the “Marmi” placed in dialogue with the reliefs of Agostino Busti, known as il Bambaia, the gesture instead follows veins and structural discontinuities, as if the form were already inscribed within the support. Even in sculpture this principle remains operative, recalling Michelangelo’s levare while overturning its Neoplatonic premise, subtraction does not liberate an ideal beauty but adheres to the resistances of matter, leaving the form in an unresolved tension. It is in the room of Raphael’s cartoon that this confrontation becomes explicit. On one side stands a world founded on legibility and a stable symbolic order, on the other stands Samorì’s La Scala, an artwork subjected to a process of material alteration that compromises its cohesion. Here the image renounces transparency, ideal architecture loses its ordering function and becomes an unstable space, in which incomplete bodies, erased identities and evaporated iconographic roles surface. The reference to the Odessa Steps from Battleship Potemkin by Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn reinforces this reading, architecture becomes a machine of violence and bodies assume the consistency of traumatic fragments, suspended between figuration and ruin. The result is a work in which art history no longer unfolds as an evolutionary sequence but as an accumulation of image-debris that migrate, overlap and collapse. If Raphael embodies a form grounded in harmony and clarity of the world, Samorì works on friction and opacity, pushing the image to the precise point at which order fractures.
Nicola Samorì, “Le variazioni di Veerendael”, 2023, olio su tavola, 42 x 32 x 2 cm, ph. credits: Roberto Marossi fotografo, courtesy Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
Metaphorically, if these works had a sound, Raphael’s cartoon would resonate with the equilibrium of Joseph Haydn’s string quartets, while the tension of Samorì’s La Scala would echo the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, where form survives only to make its own precariousness perceptible. In Samorì’s work the pictorial surface thus becomes a battlefield, in which art history operates as traumatic memory and as an unstable repository of images that have outlived their own time. The collapse evoked by the exhibition is neither destructive nor iconoclastic nor spectacular, what collapses is the illusion that form can guarantee order or reconcile the visible. As Régis Debray writes in Life and Death of the Image, “The birth of the image is closely bound up with death”, here this proximity is made operative, inscribed in the very matter of the work. For this reason, within an art system that continues to produce polished and conciliatory images, Samorì’s work asserts itself, in my view, as an uncomfortable and necessary gesture, because it denies any promise of pacification and forces the image, and the gaze that traverses it, to confront its own point of collapse.
Info:
Nicola Samorì. Classical Collapse
28/11/2025 – 1/03/2026
Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Napoli
capodimonte.cultura.gov.it
27/11/2025 – 10/03/2026
Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milano
www.ambrosiana.it
Nicola Bigliardi (1995) is an art historian, curator and writer. After graduating in Economics and Art History, he is currently a PhD student in Aesthetic Philosophy at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. His practice combines art-historical research with narrative writing, as evidenced by “Whisky & Soba” (Midgard, 2025), “Cinematics” (Postmediabooks, 2023), and “Lo spiritoso nell’arte” (Bookabook, 2021). He collaborates with art galleries, non-profit organizations, and associations, and holds lectures and conferences for museums, universities and cultural institutions.
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