A clearing opens between the trees and the light comes down through the canopy in a pale column that reaches the grass. Two figures stand near the middle of it, small and dark and barely resolved, one a little ahead of the other, walking away without hurry. Everything is green and blue and soft at the edges, the leaves given as masses rather than shapes, the far treeline dissolving into the air above it. Along the bottom edge the paint has been allowed to thin and run, a quiet reminder that the image passed through a lens before it arrived here. It is an afternoon the years have softened without letting go.

Samantha Torrisi was born in Catania in 1977 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania in 2002. She lives and works on the slopes of Mount Etna, drawing on the volcano's energies and Sicilian horizons to make dreamlike spaces where figures and places dissolve into rarefied atmospheres. Her practice integrates painting with video and photography, reclaiming in oil the images that reach us through a lens, and her subject is human presence in constant movement, transformation, and escape.