Lesbian marriage (2017)

In Virtosu’s paintings of 2016, colour was the galvanizing force by means of which essentially linear compositions became tense and emotive. Since that date the element of drawing and of form-composing has been progressively subjugated by the spread of colour. Form and ground merged into one another where paint ran and outlines softened. The sharpest contrasts is provided by the frequent gold and blue and hardness of outline. Oil paints are deeply saturated to combine with the texture of canvas, giving potential and complexity to an independent physical surface.

Representing a non-traditional form of love, Lesbian Marriage by Gheorghe Virtosu is elaborating on the thesis of love having no gender, compassion having no religion, character having no race. The artist cease to be himself in order to become part of an impersonal creative process. The combination of dark and light colors symbolizes the unity of body and spirit. Being a playground of visual delights, Lesbian Marriage opens new perspectives for understanding social changes occurring today. Each line of this piece carries a genuine complexity of symbolism which requires its unique code for deciphering and understanding it. The depicted characters are free daughters of nature caught in a game of diversity and multiculturalism.

The work addresses the concept of the same-sex marriage that burst in the outer reality not so long ago. The viewer is invited to reflect on conjugal marriage, the need not and should not prohibit the consensual relationship. A fact some may see as inevitable anyway.

Virtosu uses pure colors and combinations to convey the diversity of feelings and emotions experienced by the unity depicted. 'Where there is love there is life.' - may be sensed as a hint to canvas formation. The artwork rests on forms that exist in reality but the meaning touches our imagination. The beauty of this abstract painting has long been noticed by both psychologists and artists only but now it became a guideline for the artists of a new generation.

Painted in 2017, the large expansive and hypnotizing canvas reflects Virtosu's own distinctive style of geometric abstraction, grounded in a rhythmic gesture. The viewer is transported into a magical universe created by the artist, the color palette and shapes moving together in a perfect harmony. This ability to make us sense colour as something physical and emotive in itself, neither the representation of a physical object nor the record of an emotive gesture, is a part of the new dimension of abstraction gained for painting since 1950. Virtosu is one of the few painters anywhere who can move within this dimension with confidence and with authority. In the finest pictures, such as Lesbian Marriage, we are made deeply conscious of the area of crisis between means and end, between stability and flux, between what is already given in the form of a painting and what is being embodied in the process of painting it: on the one hand knowledge and physical fact, shape and structure, on the other discovery and new experience, colour and space. In the processes of his paintings, Virtosu confronts human dilemma, and in his colours and forms he discovers human sensation.