Samantha Torrisi

Samantha Torrisi (Catania, 1977) She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania in 2002. Lives and works in Sicily, at Mt. Etna’s slopes.

Her artistic research is based on the contamination between different expressive and communication media. In her works she reclaims, through painting, images derived from photography, cinema, from video clips and video games, television and personal video footage. Her paintings represents images of metropolitan life caught and fixed as frames. In her still-image tries to return to the viewer a vision of human existence in constant escape, research, transformation, in relation to today’s society and Nature, with particular attention to environmental issues. She collaborated on several multidisciplinary projects related to video, graphics, architecture, music and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019

- “Dell'infinito il nulla” curator Francesco Piazza – Giuseppe Veniero Project Contemporary Art Gallery, Palermo ITALY.

2017

- “Dalle parti di me” curator Ivan Quaroni – KōArt / Unconventional Place, Catania ITALY.

2016

- “Di paesaggio” curator Jacopo Leone – Galerie Immanence, Paris FRANCE.

2015

- “Una sola moltitudine” curator Giuseppe Mendolia Calella – Latienda Art Gallery, Catania ITALY.

2013

- “Shadowscapes” curator Giuseppe Iacobaci – Galleria Mini Civica, Moena-Trento ITALY.

2010

- “Meine Weltanschauung” curator Guillame Von Holden – Erbematte Home, Catania ITALY.

2008

- “An Invisible Journey” curator Stefano Elena – Galleria L’Arte Club, Catania ITALY.

2003

- “Crossings” curator Giuseppe Frazzetto – Galleria L’Arte Club, Catania ITALY.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2022

- “Quadri da marciapiede” curator Bohdan Stupak, promoter Olimpia Rospigliosi – O/R, Milan ITALY.

- “The big picture mode” curators Liana Zoza, Makis Kyriakopoulos – Cube Gallery, Patras GREECE.

2021 - 2022

- “Le Cento Sicilie” promoter Parco Archeologico Naxos Taormina, in collaboration with Lo Magno Arte contemporanea,     critical texts Ivan Quaroni – Palazzo Ciampoli, Taormina (ME); Ex Convento del Carmine, Modica (RG) ITALY.

- “Visioni oblique” curator Cristina Costanzo, in collaboration with Fondazione Orestiadi Gibellina and Dipartimento Culture e   Società-Università di Palermo – èglise, Palermo; Museo delle Trame Mediterranee Fondazione Orestiadi, Gibellina (TP) ITALY.

- “Canone Doppio” curator Francesco Piazza, with the support of the Italian Educational Institute of Athens – The Project Gallery, Athens GREECE; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Palazzo Riso, Palermo ITALY.

2020 

- “Frammenti di città” curator Francesco Piazza – Spazio Almareni, Palermo ITALY.

- “Merry Landscape” curator Maria Laura Bonifazi – Lazzaro Contemporary Art Gallery, Genova ITALY.

- “Premio Basilio Cascella Green economy” Painting – Ortona (CH) ITALY.

- “Geni Comuni” curator Roberto Sottile – Museo del Presente, Rende (CS) ITALY.

- “NOVECENTO from Pirandello to Guccione” curator Vittorio Sgarbi – Convitto delle Arti Museum, Noto (SR) ITALY.

2019 

- “Ex Voto, per arte ricevuta” curators Angelo Crespi and Alessandra Redaelli, in collaboration with Maimeri Foundation – GrandArt Fair, Milano – Museo Marino Marini, Firenze ITALY.

- “FOUR2ONE” curator Isorropia Home Gallery – Bianchi Zardin Art Gallery, Milano ITALY.

- “Il tesoro di Eros” curator Daniela Arionte – Palazzo della Cultura, Catania ITALY.

- “Carlo Farioli Art Prize”, Spazio Farioli – Palazzo Marliani Cicogna, Busto Arsizio (VA) ITALY.

- “La risposta dell’amore” curator Francesco Piazza – Cantieri Culturali della Zisa, Palermo ITALY.

2018 

- “Al più amato Giovannino d’Italia” curator Salvatore Schembari – Gesualdo Bufalino Foundation, Comiso (RG) ITALY.

- “Umani Paesaggi Urbani” curator Francesco Piazza – Giuseppe Veniero Project Contemporary Art, Palermo ITALY.

- “A5 - An archive of images and words for Sicily” curator Giuseppe Mendolia Calella – Oratorio di San Mercurio, Palermo ITALY.

2017 

- “Contemporary Sicilian Horizons” – Arionte Contemporary Art Gallery, Catania ITALY.

- “Imago Mundi. Sicilian Identities” a project by Benetton Foundation (Luciano Benetton Collection) – Cantieri Culturali della Zisa, ZAC Zona Arti Contemporanee, Palermo ITALY.

2016 

- “HeArt” curators Filippo Pappalardo, Valentina Lucia Barbagallo, text by Demetrio Paparoni – Policlinico Vittorio Emanuele, Catania ITALY.

- “Anamorfosi” curators Aurelia Nicosi, Marilisa Yolanda Spironello – Galleria Civica Montevergini, Siracusa ITALY.

- “Una mirada al mundo” curator Luis Athouguia - Palacio de D. Manuel, Evora PORTUGAL.

2015

- “Freed” curator Milena Dimitrokallis – Naxos Island GREECE.

- “Artisti di Sicilia. Nuovi talenti” curator Vittorio Sgarbi – Palazzo della Cultura, Catania ITALY.

2014 

- “Horizons of silence: a glimpse onward” curator Colectivo Cillero – Centro Cultural “La Asunciòn”, Albacete SPAIN.

2013 

- “Horizons of silence” curator Colectivo Cillero – Centro de Congresos y Exposiciones, Barbastro; Centro Cìvico Cultural José Saramago, Madrid SPAIN.

2012 

- “Premio Pittura Inail” curator Ludovico Pratesi – Palazzo Ducale, Pesaro ITALY.

- “Horizons of silence” curator Colectivo Cillero – Museu da Àgua, Lisbon PORTUGAL.

- “Premio Opera/CGIL” curators Beatrice Buscaroli, Claudio Spadoni, Ivan Quaroni – Chiostri della Biblioteca Fondazione Oriani, Ravenna; Magazzini del Sale, Cervia ITALY.

2011

- “De lo que llamamos Paz” curator Colectivo Cillero – Galeria Municipal, Sintra; Sala Expometro, Madrid; Fundación Cultural Frax, Alicante SPAIN.

2009 

- “Un’altra parola, un altro sguardo” curators Lia Rocco, Amici della Pittura Siciliana dell’Ottocento – FAM Fabbriche Chiaramontane, Agrigento ITALY.

2007 

- “Premio Celeste” curators Gianluca Marziani, Ivan Quaroni – San Gimignano-Siena ITALY.

2006 

- “A Mare l’Arte” curator Alessandra Menesini, Fondazione Bartoli-Felter – Centro Culturale Lazzaretto, Cagliari ITALY.

- “I Segnali dell’Aurora. Nuova generazione artistica catanese” curator Angelo Scandurra – Galleria d’Arte Moderna Le Ciminiere, Catania ITALY.

2005 

- “Premio Mario Razzano” curator Antonio Pertrilli – Museo del Sannio, Rocca dei Rettori, Benevento ITALY.

- “I Biennale internazionale d’Arte Microcredito Turchia” curator Nursen Güngör – Museo di Pittura e Scultura dello Stato; Ministero della Cultura e del Turismo, Ankara TURKEY.

www.samanthatorrisi.it
www.instagram.com/samanthatorrisi_art

The vision of Samantha Torrisi is mainly characterized by large suburban, agoraphobic spaces where shadows and uncatchable human figures are caught by photograms that are stripped away by shots of surveillance cameras to the course of time. Such images are scrutinized by an external gaze able to size their rhythms and movements and transfigure them into far and elusive images who plead to be paied back for their disembodied existences.

The warmth and the shades of colours seem to cuddle benevolent and fragile solitudes while fixing them in a splendid, quiet and eternal time. In Samantha’s images the sign fades, the detail looses its boundaries, in a dream which suckles the viewer. The second that is sized away from some other person’s life becomes a dream, a vague, plausible, ancestral remembrance that cannot be clearly situated. This is why such fraction of time ends up by assuming universal, tangible and true features. The most recent production of the artist is well represented in this exhibition. It regards two formally opposed developments that are anyhow coherent. On one hand, there are new suggestions and new spatial perspectives: instead of neons and halls of unrestlessness there are foggy unbounded landscapes, there are twilights, weak morning mists, snow and glimmers which amongst cold samplings of whites and greys, never abandon but actually amplify that silent and delicate introspection which is the measure of the Sicilian artist.

On the other hand unedited dyacronic breakings on more frames are priviledged (here the colors are similar to the ones used in the past). These evolve from her initial career and develop from further observations of the subject. The subject is narrated, reconsidered by close ups and represented on more surfaces (along cinema terminology); and the fascinating and oppressive agoraphobic labirynthic surroundings are here completely forgotten.

Particularly fascinating is the piece “Following the map”, where the film, divided in two tables, is used to show us new open spaces, such spaces are walked by a film subject, who starts his restless quest “following a map”, in complete control of his own destiny and consciuous of his own research. This is a perfect synthesis of the artist’s poetic vein, that fastens her work and reveals hints of her future artistic production.
(Text by Giuseppe Iacobaci from the solo show “Shadowscapes”, giugno 2013)

Samantha Torrisi tells about “not explose” moments of metropolitan life.
(Giuseppe Frazzetto from “Collezione di Arte Contemporanea del Castello di Aci, Museo dei giovani artisti” – Ed. Mazzotta, Milano 2001)