Samantha Torrisi's Postvirtual Painting: Disorienting Space and Perspective

Samantha Torrisi (Catania, 1977) creates paintings that explore virtuality through a unique manipulation of space and perspective. Her works, which will be featured in two group exhibitions at The Project Gallery in Athens and in Taormina in the coming months, draw on the material inconsistency of early 21st-century video games like Silent Hill and Japanese survival horror films such as The Ring. Torrisi deconstructs environments, stripping them of volume and depth, and disrupting physical laws like gravity. Her paintings create a mobile perspective, forcing continuous refocusing as space appears to shift within the frame. Shadow figures serve not as focal points but as calibrating references for an elusive, multi-directional perspective. The artist's approach produces a sense of disorientation akin to virtual reality, yet it is a 'native' virtuality of painting, paralleling mechanisms familiar from technological virtuality. Her misty, smoke-like figures float on the canvas like partially embodied holograms, never fully materializing. This work synthesizes various forms of the virtual—from 'The Matrix' to the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte, from literary imagination to Leonardesque atmospheres and the perspectival estrangement of VR headsets—resulting in what might be termed 'postvirtual' art.