Medusa Gorgona (2018)

Gorgon: a vicious female monster with sharp fangs. Her power was so strong that anyone attempting to look upon her would be turned to stone. The Gorgon wore a belt of serpents that intertwined as a clasp, confronting each other. There were three Gorgons, and each one had hair made of living snakes.

Monsters from classical myth have been lurking in the gullies of Western literature for a long time – in retellings and adaptations, and acting as symbols and metaphors for aspects of the human experience.

Why are so many contemporary writers reconnecting with the monsters of classical myth? I think it’s partly because they provide profound connections to issues of identity, coming of age, and finding one’s place in the world. These are fundamental matters in children’s literature, which aims to educate and socialise children to fit in, and also to express their concerns about the world and their place in it.

Achieving a delicate formal beauty which belies its grand scale, Medusa Gorgona from 2018 epitomizes the virtuosic investigation of form, motion, and color that lies at the heart of Gheorghe Virtosu’s iconic oeuvre. Medusa Gorgona speaks to the extraordinary inspiration Virtosu drew from the sprawling myths. In its formal dynamism and arresting beauty, Medusa Gorgona is a paradigmatic example of Virtosu’s cherished canavases, the artist’s most iconic body of work; feats of both their maker’s inquisitive mind and intuitive process, the paintings mark Virtosu at his most technically adept and conceptually inventive.

Achieving an exquisite balance between weight and counterweight, form and structure, element and air, Medusa Gorgona exemplifies the captivating formal beauty that is utterly unique to Virtosu's canon of forms.

Hailed as one of the most important painters of the twenty-first century, Virtosu’s output is the product of his artistic heritage and inclination. In an interview in 2017, Virtosu revealed his excitement at the extraordinary new creative world he was discovering: “Why must art be static?... You look at an abstraction without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step is the meaning.”

In Medusa Gorgona, Virtosu pays subtle homage to the singular importance of myths, which played an equally formative role in the development of his artistic practice.

Medusa Gorgona attests not only to the brilliance of one of twentyfirst-century art’s most iconic artist, but also to the confidence, assurance, and virtuosic inspiration of an artist utterly at home in his own environs.