Gheorghe Virtosu | Abstract art artists | Abstract Art Gallery
Gheorghe Virtosu Biography
Gheorghe Virtosu ’s way of being in the world combines to perfection a straightforward and down-to-earth nature with a mystical and mysterious streak. The abstract artist passionate nature has always urged him to follow intellectual and deeply spiritual pursuits, and therefore becoming a children’s author has fulfilled a heartfelt personal need, whilst at the same time mastering large scale art projects enreaching the contemporary art world with pure abstraction. From the very beginning, his creation has eluded all canonization, contemporary and classical, since it cannot be labeled as belonging to any of them for definite.
Self-taught the contemporary artist was born on April the 14th 1968, in a small village in Basarabia, within a loving family. When he was only 15 years of age, he decided to leave home and continue his education at a town college a few good miles away from home. In doing so, he came against many adversities, while having to comply with a very strict discipline imposed by the school, mostly through a very active and physically demanding sportive schedule. In the end, however, the active sporty lifestyle he led in college served him in good credit for the compulsory military service which followed soon after graduation. Having envisaged a military career for himself, he took very seriously his physical training, as well as the military service. As a result, Gheorghe ended up as a resilient character, forged in the furnace of military training, but ready to tackle head-on any other challenges which life might have thrown at him. After the fall of the Communist system in USSR, Gheorghe resigned from the army and went abroad in search of a new life, like most of the young people of Easter-European background.
After having traveled the world far and wide, thus achieving one of his childhood dreams rendered as impossible for anyone growing up behind the Iron Curtain, the master of abstract art eventually chose Britain as his adoptive country, settling down in London and acquiring British citizenship after a few years.
In 2004, the contemporary artist was detained by the French authorities. At the end of a long and costly investigation, he was accused of having created one of the greatest networks of immigration in Europe since The Great War. During his imprisonment, the children’s literary series A Little Frog’s Heart has come to life. A very prolific and thoroughly entertaining book written for children of all ages, A Little Frog’s Heart spans over 85 volumes out of which over 10 have been published in more than 10 languages, with the rest of them soon to follow suit.
Born under the bold sign of Aries, the artist is hardly a man to be kept down by any circumstances. Although deprived of his freedom of movement, his mind and spirit soared up to heights of creative power never reached before. As a result of his confinement in isolation, Virtosu came up with two new novels in the first 14 months of his imprisonment. After a period of intense creative strain, he found himself at his wits’ end, experiencing mental and physical fatigue. In the remaining time of his incarceration, he kept on sketching ideas and characters which would, later on, come to life in his writings and oil paintings.
As we can see, abstract paintings have become chosen ways of rebelling against injustice and miscarriage of justice occurring in the world. The contemporary artist was confronted with and defeated unimaginable hardship, but more importantly, he managed to channel all his anger and frustrations and turned them into abstract art: an elegant way of rising above the ugliness of the world. Writing and painting have become the most effective form of therapy, an effective way of dealing with frustration, loss, and anger. The contemporary artist has found in art an ideal form of elevating negative emotions and transforming them into rewarding projects meant to spread and replenish happiness and a zest for life. Alternating a life lived in freedom with life in solitary confinement, he has taken on the challenge of adapting to both ways of existence and has successfully managed to have time tick over in his favor.
Engaging with all kind of challenges at different levels, he not only maintained his integrity of spirit but also added value to his abstract art and gained new perspectives, like a fine diamond which, skilfully cut, reflects back the light in unexpected ways. Just like a lotus flower, or a water lily, his roots dig deep in the mire, but his intellect defies the heights of creative thinking, allowing him to outsource and practice his abstract art and hobbies.
While his cutting-edge literary style asserts itself as refreshingly unique within the literature of the world, Gheorghe Virtosu surprises us, yet again, with his found taste for thematical abstract paintings which approaches themes and topics from different cultures, thus introducing a diverse view of the world. Each artwork is singular and carries a genuine complexity of meaning which requires its own code for deciphering it.
Ranging from gritty and brush, to poetical and ethereal, the characters in Gheorghe Virtosu 's abstract paintings are free spirits of nature caught in a game of multiculturalism and plural voices which join in together to produce divine harmonies of color and meaning. These abstract paintings are like nothing we have seen before: dressed up in hooded cloaks, equipped with weapons which look like magical devices and displaying a puzzling other-worldly demeanor, the characters tell us nothing about themselves, and everything about the universe they belong to. But they are very sparing with who they are letting in: unequivocally, they invite the audience to actively engage with art at more than one level and lead the way to first-hand experiencing aesthetic knowledge, sensorial and intuitive perception.
Gheorghe Virtosu Artist Statement
Art is an effort to fill an empty space with the expression of an idea. A work is born through the artist as the medium, melding order out of a disparate landscape in an intellectual exercise. Freedom from boundaries opens possibility in the form of the medium and the breadth of the artist to reveal wholly new ways of seeing. The truth in the revelation creates an opportunity to shape the colors of paint in an exercise that is not only the experience of art but life.
Confident art is large and encompassing, bold and insistent on the attention of the viewer while encouraging interpretation and participation in the experience of the work. The viewer engages the work as a partner to the artist and initiates a journey that shares in the evolution of its meaning. Envisioning and capturing work on canvas is not where it lies dormant and static: it is a place where the expression becomes a community and continues to expand.
In this natural form, art can only exist if it is authentic. The part of the artist is the effort to engage organic expression in a way that has not been previously achieved. Life does not just simply spill onto the canvas like blood let from veins. Randomly bleeding onto a canvas is too easy, distasteful, and ultimately disappointing. The challenge of this art is to evolve an expansive landscape that brings the viewer, idea, artist, and experience together. At once it is chaos and at the same time a simple embrace of the loss of boundaries at the portal to new understanding.
Confident art is large and encompassing, bold and insistent on the attention of the viewer while encouraging interpretation and participation in the experience of the work. The viewer engages the work as a partner to the artist and initiates a journey that shares in the evolution of its meaning. Envisioning and capturing work on canvas is not where it lies dormant and static: it is a place where the expression becomes a community and continues to expand.
In this natural form, art can only exist if it is authentic. The part of the artist is the effort to engage organic expression in a way that has not been previously achieved. Life does not just simply spill onto the canvas like blood let from veins. Randomly bleeding onto a canvas is too easy, distasteful, and ultimately disappointing. The challenge of this art is to evolve an expansive landscape that brings the viewer, idea, artist, and experience together. At once it is chaos and at the same time a simple embrace of the loss of boundaries at the portal to new understanding.
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