Humanity has been looking up into the sky since the very beginning of its existence. It entices us with the eternity of space and with the sensation of freedom that birds illuminate. The desire to fly is the nostalgia about the Paradiso Perduto - spiritual, pure side we lost in the whirlpool of civilization.

Not surprisingly, this theme became the source of inspiration for some of the great masters, like Marc Chagall. But if for Chagall the motif of the flight was filled with the lyrical connotations of love, music, dreaming, in the interpretation of Gheorghe Virtosu it gets a different direction.

The palette

The oil painting has certain dramatic tension, seen in the active usage of dark colors - conquering the sky has always been associated with passion and danger, it’s enough to remember the myth about Daedalus and Icarus.

The palette emits a sense of determination and struggle. This ambiance is supported by the character of the drawing: the painter’s style in this oil painting calls up parallels with the fusion of Surrealism and Abstraction, developed by Juan Miro. The artist applies biomorphic curvature of forms, accentuated expressiveness of line, the intersection of shapes that is turned into the colorful mosaic.

The composition has an upward dynamic, created by the emphasized lightness of the lower part: the drawing seems to grow out one single point, like a plant, and expand greatly, then almost vanish in the upper part.

Visual space

Untypical for the artist element of the featured canvas is the disunity of the fragments; the author usually tends toward centric compositions with a more or less firm conglomerate of geometric shapes.

Music is made not merely and solely by the sounds, but by the pauses between them.

Similar, void, or the so-called ‘negative space’ between the elements of the design, is not just a ‘background’ - it is an active participant in creating the visual space of the image, giving an intensive result with the help of the minimum of artistic means. Just like the airflow, which is invisible but essential for flying.

Action

A careful public will see that Flying man isn’t an image of a fantasizer, but of the person of action. We always imagine this process as the essence of joy and liberation. And for sure, it’s true, however, it is important to remember that birds flap wings in order to fly, so it’s not a passive process.