The boss fight is offscreen in Leonardo Devito's Dark Souls
The Florence-born painter puts the monitor, the keyboard and an unimpressed onlooker on canvas
A bare room with terracotta tiles. A young man on a stool, hunched at a desk, keyboard under both hands, mouse waiting, a boss arena glowing on the monitor. Behind the player, a woman in a green housedress caught mid-reproach, a shadow running long across the floor. The painting is called Dark Souls (2025), it is by the Italian painter Leonardo Devito, and it reached the games side of the internet through a post from Outsiders, the editorial project run by Alfredo Accatino.
Devito was born in Florence in 1997 and works in Turin; Devito took a BA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and an MFA at the Accademia Albertina, and shows with Ciaccia Levi in Paris and Milan and The Artist Room in London. The figuration runs Renaissance drawing through an underground filter, and childhood—its rooms, its supervision, its negotiations—keeps returning as a subject.
Ten years ago Killscreen covered games crossing into painting from the other direction, when official Ico and Shadow of the Colossus canvases went up for sale—the game's imagery, framed for your wall. Devito inverts the transaction. What hangs in the gallery now is not the world inside the monitor but the domestic apparatus around it: the desk, the posture, the person who wants the room back. Play has become a scene painting can take as seriously as a card game or a piano lesson.
Radar covers the traffic between games and the rest of culture — painters, printmakers, choreographers, the lot. Three finds a week in the free letter.
