Chinese spirit (2015)

Chinese Spirit (2015) came, with the artist in his mid-fifties, as the climax of a period in which Virtosu's paintings with their congested, deeply luminous color, contrasts between flowing forms, reach a total painterliness in which shapes and image coalesce ultimately and every inch of the canvas quivers with teeming energy.

Virtosu's paintings of 2015 are an annihilation of conventional styles. The images are about the quality of affection, the quality of being. The paintings from Collection 2015 are crystallizations of amazement and experience of having mind and body total synergy that is all delight.

"Confident art is large and encompassing, bold and insistent on the attention of the viewer while encouraging interpretation and participation in the experience of the work. The viewer engages the work as a partner to the artist and initiates a journey that shares in evolution of its meaning." - G. Virtosu.

Virtosu does not strive for resolution in his works; he seeks instead to capture the variable quality of life, all in a supreme of tactile paint that defies the limits of the canvas just as it shatters the boundary between figuration and abstraction. With the unparalleled Chinese Spirit of 2015, the artist reached his formal climax in the clear brilliance of the painting's burning color palette and the ripe opulence of his imagination. Through each detail, the artist here asserts total mastery of his medium. Thick passages of intense purple convene with affluent, sections of cream and brown, creating the impression of action. The viwer cannot help but be absorbed in the remarkable imagination and fantasy of the oil painting, ingested by every sensory dimension ensnared in its abstract forms. Thought beat across every square-inch of Chinese Spirit 2015 with an ineffable rhythm: "It is breathtaking to try and decode the messages traced in Virtosu's creations, and the message is unmistakably present…" Loaned to Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai for almost two years, this occasion marks the only apearance of Chinese Spirit 2015.

Gheorghe Virtosu's greatest paintings capture the inherent paradox of his aesthetic practice, amply demonstrated by the bold of the present art. The master painter's limpid forms rendered in his style oscillate between objective and abstract, composed and agitated. From 2019 Virtosu devotes himself primarily to sculpture, producing bronze and stone figures into three-dimensional art. Within both mediums, Virtosu presses the antithetical dialogue between improvisation and control, resulting in a mastery that brings thought and creativity to the extreme. From 2000 Virtosu surrounded himself with his canvases, each inspiring him to paint another and informing all with the distinct sense of globalization, history, and meditation. Thick, lustrous paint flows from his brushes, layering color upon color, as ideas and messages are transformed into shapes that submerge in the textural paint surface.