Young Quasimodo (2017)

„Young Quasimodo” (2017), despite the timeframe of the main character’s evolution, represents nothing less than the inescapable and incontrollable apex of maturity, a moment when forces clash under the siege of a new personal hierarchy. Quasimodo, a fearful appearance drawn from Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, “Pope of the Fools” as he was called, covers up for a caring soul that has fallen in love with his dear Esmeralda, a girl charmed by the whirls of societal norms.

In defiance of any other of his shortcomings, or rather thanks to them, a storm of contradictions defines his inner world and that was exactly what set the character in stone for the literary history, especially since Hugo was an admirer of architecture and its reign over the consuming time which discards of unarmed words printed just on paper.

In a similar gesture, that continues the focus on what defeats the passing of time, Vîrtosu took to the canvas the emotional turmoil of Quasimodo and splashed it into brutal and numerous fragments brought together by complementary relations, but otherwise brutally separate, unlike other paintings of his.

Spikes of colourful paste, laid on top of another, insinuate a sort of disobedience of the artwork itself as it dares to appeal to the viewer’s affective relationship with what might have been himself during youth. Watching the narration of the painting, one cannot skive the possibility of re-enacting a glimpse of the process of becoming a human being in its entirety. Mr. Vîrtosu confesses on that matter, as an invitation for reflection to his fellow viewers:

"The flow of ideas expressed in my works are an intrinsic part of my being, and I daresay that every single piece of canvas reflects the whole of my personality."