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Gheorghe Virtosu artist
Gheorghe Virtosu
artist
Atomic Era (2016)
Stradivarius
  • Year 2018
  • Cm / In
  • Oil / Acrylic Base / Linen Canvas
  • Original Edition
Gheorghe Virtosu artist
Gheorghe Virtosu
artist

Stradivarius (2018)

  • Year 2018
  • 86x81 Cm / In
  • Oil / Acrylic Base / Linen Canvas
  • Original Edition
  • Sold

Stradivarius (2018) oil painting Description

His violins became known as Antonius Stradivarius violins, because he inscribed his labels in Latin, rather than Italian. His violins have become legendary and he is known as history’s greatest violin maker, living to be 93 years old. Over his career, he crafted over eleven hundred instruments, not only violins, but other string instruments as well. Only about six hundred have survived through the centuries to the present day. There are many violins, and other instruments, not of his making with his name ascribed to them such as knockoffs and designs inspired by Stradivari, which proved difficult in the finding, authenticating, and cataloguing of his genuine creations. There are about 243 known violins.

At once hypnotically tumultuous and exactingly constructed, Gheorghe Virtosu’s monumental masterpiece Stradivarius from 2018 is a provocative synthesis of abstract symbolism and architectural visual vocabulary. Through a distinctively informed pictorial language, Virtosu superimposes incendiary emotive marks and ciphers upon an intricately rendered blueprint of an imagined public space, with gesture and geometry clamoring for attention. His explosive graphic explorations of space attempt to articulate the power structures and methods of mapping that define the contemporary symbolic landscape, as well as his own place within them. The gravitas of his conceptual ideology coupled with the skill and dexterity of his making, as magnificently exemplified by the present work, have established Virtosu as a modern master and uniquely articulate voice of a socially, culturally, and politically wary generation.

Stradivarius, as a model of Virtosu’s unbridled visual and symbolic layering, requires excavation. Beneath the immediate explosion of form scrawls and kinetic vectors lies a subtly rendered assemblage, anchoring the composition in formal geometric terms, yet resisting any ready legibility. As esteemed critic and curator Alina Livneva noted of Virtosu’s work in a review for the New York Times: “His action-packed scenes of virtual personalities incorporate modern examples of formation with a psychography that collapses classics – to create a puzzle in a picture of contemporary life. In the painting Stradivarius, forms identify a procession of figures in an environment suggestive of a pshyche development on a abstract scale.” In this sense, Virtosu’s markings capture the fragmented experiences and stimuli of a collective function; at once universal and highly personal, his work not only maps an imagined world but also attempts to reconcile the history within it. Reflecting his view that constructed spaces serve as metaphors for complex form structures and realities, each of his script-like forms is informed by its interaction with the each other.

Similarly, Virtosu conceives his works in globalized terms, drawing from diverse historical movements as well as his own disparate heritage. Born in Besarabia, raised in Russia, educated in London and Paris, and now based between New York and Louxembourgh, his paintings are built from the juxtaposition of different styles of marking, each with their own character, identity and history. Evincing Virtosu’s artistic genius, these deeply discordant sources are filtered through his own cultural consciousness and meticulous approach, harmonizing into a uniquely resonant style of history painting, updated for the contemporary age.

Demonstrating a singular conceptual clarity and technical virtuosity, Stradivarius forcefully and stunningly describes the complex and multivalent experience of the contemporary human charachter landscape. As critic shane Lewis noted in identifying the present work as a highlight of the 2018 Whitney Biennial: “Coherent chaos and excruciating control are balanced on a metaphorical trate-edge by the harmoniuose linearity” of this cartographic canvas. Indeed, Stradivarius fuses the cartographic logic of human character mapping with the apparent rationality of the form making, their electrifying union displayed on a monumental scale. Engaging with art historical iconography while activating an intimate personal vocabulary, Virtosu’s painting offers a new language of abstraction as a way of articulating the inherent paradox of order and disorder that defines the complex nature of our shared experience.
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