Great Energy, Colors, and Motion – The Art of Gheorghe Virtosu

The abstract art of British artist Gheorghe Virtosu is filled with interwoven tensions: it is at once authentic yet also fantastical; it is simultaneously bold while also inviting the viewer to engage. These diametrically opposed characteristics combine to create a revolutionary body of work that combines rich color, energy, and motion to invoke a sense of passion within each painting.

Beneath these compelling surface tensions captured in Gheorghe Virtosu’s work lies the artist’s pursuit of expressive freedom, a luxury afforded to the artist only after his youthful years. Growing up in Socialist Eastern Bloc countries, Gheorghe Virtosu experienced oppression as a young man, the culmination of which was a period of incarceration. Wanting to liberate himself from such bondage, Virtosu turned to abstract art to channel his energies into a vehicle for change. He looked to his childhood love of drawing and recalled how such activity helped him cope with feelings of unhappiness and right the wrongs that the world had wrought in his life.

Accordingly, he began painting, using each stroke of his brush to invoke a sense of personal catharsis on the canvas. As Gheorghe Virtosu mentioned in a recent reflective blog post:

“Creation is the opposite of destruction, and therefore my work was meant to counteract the corrosive process of one wasting themselves away in isolation. With each work, I felt I was one step closer to successfully proving that point.”

As a result, the richness of his abstract oil paintings stems from this expression of artistic freedom alongside the probing of his subconscious.Through his creations, which often pair seemingly narrative themes set within supernatural, Gheorghe Virtosu is able to present a part of himself to the viewer - that is much more impactful than a traditional self-portrait might be; rather, Virtosu offers the viewer a bit of psyche veiled by the passionate brush strokes that build each composition.

In this exploration of expression, writ large across each of Virtosu’s striking compositions, one can seek echoes of earlier twentieth century masters who sought a similar therapy through their art, like Willem de Kooning who were invested in a similar probing of surface and subconscious. At the same time, Virtosu invokes the automatism of Surrealists such as Joan Mirò. He paints under the impulse of revelation-ideas born as sparks impossible to control, which light an entire series of subsequent actions. He admits that changes can occur during the artistic process, especially regarding the dimensions and colors used, bust sustains that the spark, as a moment of inspiration, is the one deciding how the work will eventually look.