Fabio Giampietro is an Italian artist who combines oil painting with virtual reality. His paintings show cityscapes seen from above and use the fear of heights to draw viewers in. He paints by subtracting colour from the canvas, and he creates virtual reality environments that extend the paintings so that viewers appear to step into them.
Giampietro's father was a computer programmer, and as a child he drew comics. His series Vertigo was exhibited in galleries, where he noticed visitors posing as if falling into the huge canvases, which pointed him towards interactivity. He began the project Hyperplanes of Simultaneity in 2015. In it he starts with a painting, then makes a virtual reality version, and then paints screenshots from that version.
