"Social Distancing" Painting

Virtosu’s paintings invite viewers to inhabit the weird tension between familiarity and strangeness.

Being an adept of crude metaphors and not afraid to be emphatic about it, Dominic Virtosu is exploring the actuality and in-actuality of painting. With his solid work experience in the field of advertising, he is playing with its lively chaos of imagery and creates a sort of “peinture d’essai”. The artists’ desire to shock, to provoke, to hurt the retina, comes from his interior fracture: between revolt towards consumerist advertising and his simultaneous attraction towards its inexhaustible, toxic imaginarium. This is a painting style that is not “nice” nor is it “tame”.

The artists’ meeting with Neo Rauch’s art and the neorealist movement at the Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig under the tutelage of professor Annette Schröter has had a profound influence on his narrative style aș well aș on his technique. A Masters’ graduate at the Național University of Arts in Bucharest in the painting class of Professor Cătălin Bălescu, the artist has developped his own visual language made up of contemporary references, clues that he degrades in ironic and visual distopias („Memory Empty” - 2011, „See You Later” - 2019, “The Gathering – Bunny” - 2019, „Family” - 2021, "Good Vibes Only" - 2021 and “Fun Times” – 2022).

Through the (de)valuing of iconography coded by advertisting, TV and influencers, Virtosu is enticing the viewer into a familiar and colorful screenplay. In works such as „Social Distancing” – 2021 – the artist sends a nod to the guru of art marketing - Jeff Koons’ „inflatables” series. The mystical dimension given to simulated success, is one of the themes that mirror the solitude and intimacy of the artists’ studio during quarantine.

There is, of course, a lot of biographical material in these paintings. There’s the admission of a family that was profoundly hurt by the 50 years of communism in which they survived; this recollection is partially digested, in a cathartic, almost therapeutic way, in works such as „We come together” – 2019 and „The Ten Commandments” – 2019 – that are directly inspired by the vitality of the resistance in the countryside against the regime.