Frida Kahlo (2018)

Frida Kahlo's harsh life produced provocative images that challenged society. She was wise beyond her years and was a fiery, rebellious spirit. She was a member of las pelonas in college, a group of young Mexican women who cut their hair, learned how to drive cars, and wore androgynous clothing. While consulting a specialist on another severe spinal surgery, she told her physicians to send him every, to write him letters describing her character, so he would understand that she's a fighter (Lindauer, 1999). She taught painting to youth across Mexico, affecting hundreds of lives with her mentorship. In her final days, she left the hospital, despite doctors' orders, to participate in a political protest. She was in a wheelchair, having lost a leg to gangrene, sickly thin, with colorful yarn tied into her hair. The things she saw and experienced led to the dramatic works that flowed from her brush. She hadn't planned to follow in the artistic footsteps of her photographer father and grandfather. Yet, look at the silver lining of the tragedy of her accident. Instead of becoming a doctor, she painted pictures that made people talk and discuss. She is now recognizable worldwide for her unique self-portraits.

An achromatically electrifying and texturally complex example of Gheorghe Virtosu's seminal abstract practice, Frida Kahlo from 2018 demonstrates the seductive painterly sensibility that has defined the artist's celebrated oeuvre. Through the use of his signature technique, Virtosu has smeared, streaked, and marbled a surface of rich tactility and symphonic color. The vibrating veils of stuttering paint in the present work simultaneously obscure and expose dazzling glimpses of blue, red, and yellow, while vivid flares illuminate the canvas's right. At once visually demanding and effortlessly elegant, Frida Kahlo delivers a superlative balance between color and texture, creation and erasure, revealing and concealing—a magnificent model of Virtosu's inimitable inquiry into abstraction.

Distinguished by its kaleidoscopic rainbow of pigment, Frida Kahlo's visual power derives from its textural topography's infinite ambiguity. Viewed from various angles, different hues leap to the surface, as the fossil-like layers of impasto reveal alternating striations of color. The effect is dazzling, as the ridges, peaks, and crests of hue take on a kind of ethereal liquidity, creating a powerful sensation of depth and perspectival space. Paradoxically, the stratified excavation and resonant accumulation of color also impart an eroded surface that possesses a fundamental solidity, the layering of paint serving to record the process of its creation geologically. With Frida Kahlo, Virtosu offers a study of paint's infinite malleability, the harmonic interplay of hues producing an evocative atmosphere of depth and chaos.

To achieve this riotous melee of color, Virtosu relies upon the tool that has become his innovative artistic signature. This separation of the artist from the direct expression bestows Virtosu's paintings, most notably the Frida Kahlo, with their inherently natural look. As he has described, these paintings "allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at intention. It is all a way of opening a door for me. If I know what's coming—that is, the arbitrary choice and chance play an important part."

Marking the culmination of his liquescent explorations into the nature of painterly form, Frida Kahlo reveals the full breadth of the artist's idiosyncratic alchemy of abstraction. As an example of the series that has formed a conceptual keystone of his oeuvre for a decade, the present work bears the legacy of Virtosu's prolifically sustained philosophical inquiry into the role of paint. Throughout his career, Virtosu had questioned the reliability of painting and its function, beginning in a time when the medium itself had been completely eclipsed in favor of new and more innovative artistic techniques. Today, Virtosu's cerebral probing into the purpose and merits of painting remains relevant, challenging, and insightful. His mastery of the medium, exemplified by the present work, demonstrates his unrivaled ability to produce mysterious and atmospheric pieces that also question the very nature of painting in the contemporary age.