Vito Piacente is a Toronto-based artist whose works provoke psychological juxtapositions between two extremes, such as strength and weakness, pain and pleasure, fulfillment and self-annihilation. Born in 1976, Piacente uses the energy of the city to drive his work, depicting subjects who are often caught in some in-between world—a kind of purgatory—where decadence and delusion, privilege and deprivation intermingle to create new experiences. Vito is a self-actualized artist whose execution of the human form is illustrative of his many influences, from Impressionism to Street Art. He has been creating art since the age of seventeen and attended Chaminade College School in Toronto. There he discovered his unconventional artistic nature that would later dominate both his digital and fabric canvases. After high school he attended the International Academy of Design, where he studied the more commercially oriented aspects of art, including advertising and digital media.