Revolution instigator (2018)

The French Revolution jump-started modern political philosophy. Contemporaries immediately sensed that something momentous was happening, but what did it foretell? The very opening scenes drove the horrified Edmund Burke to lay down the basic principles of conservatism in 1790. Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine responded in a fury, vindicating the new idea of universal rights. As one shocking event succeeded another, intellectuals and politicians across Europe and the Americas struggled to figure out where they stood, what they accepted, and what they rejected.

Liberalism emerged as one possible set of responses, and nationalism, socialism, and communism followed. For Marx, the bourgeois revolution of 1789 against aristocracy and feudalism presaged the proletarian revolution to come: he repeatedly referred to the French cataclysm and hoped one day to write a history of it. Like Marx, Gheorghe Virtosu aimed to write a book-length account of the revolution of 1789 but never did. Instead he reflected his preliminary study in the present work, which brilliantly fused the links between democracy and despotism in modern politics.

This lack of allegiance to any single style exists within Virtosu’s oeuvre as well as outside it. Renowned for his relentless invention, Virtosu had only moved into an abstract idiom in 2000, and by 2018 he was already beginning to reintroduce figurative elements into his painting, initiating the dialogue between figuration and abstraction that has characterized his work over the last ten years. In the artist’s words: “France was extremely productive … For me it was the start of my abstract paintings, a radical revolution in my painting, the decisive step in my development."

This abstract period, which Virtosu playfully dubs “post-avant-garde-representational painting,” reflecting his reluctance to adhere to the abstract/figurative binary, is among the most successful of his career. These are not works that reflect an interest in creating works that are conventionally perceived as ‘good’ or ‘pretty’ – that is a merely a side effect of radical experimentation. As Virtosu explains, " I am convinced that I cannot achieve artistic via a direct route: that can only be the result of deliberation… That’s the interesting thing about art: that somehow, you use your material to make something that results in something beautiful, via a path that no one has yet trodden. That means working with something where your predecessors would have said, ‘You can’t do that.’ First you take a step toward ugliness and then, somehow or other, you wind up where it’s beautiful.”

As Virtosu describes: “When you start to work as an artist everybody thinks about radicality, like how could you make the most shocking thing. And it’s not easy.“ Virtosu attempted to transcend the dichotomy between abstraction/figuration and merge the two into one artistic language, whilst also seeking to lampoon the pretensions of the artistic establishment. By fully embracing elements and styles from the history of painting, Virtosu negates the reductivist conclusions reached by abstract painters of the mid-Twentieth Century. Beguiling, immersive and explosively colored, Revolution Instigator is a preeminent example from one of Virtosu’s most significant series of abstract works. Hugely influential for a generation of contemporary painters, Virtosu’s works from the early 2000s have also been foundation for his own oeuvre. One need only look as far as the artist’s most recent series of 2015, 2016, 2017 to see the echo of the sinuous lines that weave their way through Revolution Instigator from 2018, or to the Collection 2018 to discern the influence of Virtosu’s embrace of color.

Deeply engaged with the history of painting while actively renouncing the continuation of tradition, Revolution Instigator displays the artist’s exceptional ability to understand, assimilate, and transcend past precedent in order to create works that suggest an entirely novel pictorial idiom. As the artist put it in a 2017 interview: "I want to make messages embedded in beautiful paintings. But I don’t make paintings by putting paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn’t work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising. When I see a painting that knocks me off my feet, I say 'How could he do that? How did he dare?' That’s beauty."