Excerpt from review "The Next Big Thing":

You remember those dreams when you suddenly realised that you'd got on the school bus without noticing you hadn't got any clothes on? Furio Torracchi does.

The one-time ceramacist, transplanted from Florence to London, has recently moved into painting. His works-small, child-like and brightly coloured, like italianete Julian Opies - look as though they should be about jolly things. Road signs and formulaically painted clouds and houses suggest the certainties of childhood. Instead, they're about the uncertainties.

Take "I am naked under the tree" (left)

There is the titular tree, but where's the naked I? The picture, all simple forms and household paint, invites you in: then, having done so, pushes you right back out again. Just to make the point, Torracchi has placed a livid no-entry sign in the foreground. Instead of the artist providing you with a vicarious nude, you are left to imagine yourself, presumably unclothed, in his place.

"It's based on a fusion between painting and viewer," says Torracchi. "People are interested in things that are personal to them, not in what some artist has to say about it.

Charles Darwent
The Independent Newspaper