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France
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8 x 12 in ($100)
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White ($80)
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I first started working on an the white astronaut...getting lost in the intricate details of the space suit. Getting passionate about the reflections and all the different colored shades of grey that I could decipher on his suit. And then it dawned on me: what I'm making does not need to make sense from the beginning. I've decided that this painting would fight for its own 'raison d'être' later on. Till then, I would have fun bringing it into existence. So the next step was to set-up a space around the astronaut. First I wanted to create an explosion, but I thought that might also be too obvious. So I created this abstract / flaky space around him. It's also a space that awkwardly ends at some point. Then...I just let the lonely astronaut marinate for a few weeks. I was looking at the painting almost every day and never quite figured out what I should put in there next. Until one day when it just came to me: another astronaut might be cool. And then I just drew the new one into the picture. The second astronaut is just a line drawing. He is dematerialized in the negative space of darkness. He is just a sketch, a concept, something that you get a glimpse of with the corner of your eye. Something like "second nature". He is indispensable to the composition and yet he is not the central part of it. Just like in marriage. An astronaut and another astronaut. And a kind of weird colored space between them. I think it was just at the time that I also saw the movie "Gravity" (with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock directed by Alfonso Cuaron) that the idea dawned on me to create an artwork featuring astronauts. I was inspired by the interaction between the two actors and how their love story actually gave a purpose to the whole film. This is a painting about marriage...who would have thought. There's the black-suited astronaut (the groom) and the white astronaut (the bride).
Print:Giclee on Fine Art Paper
Size:8 W x 12 H x 0.1 D in
Size with Frame:13.25 W x 17.25 H x 1.2 D in
Frame:White
Ready to Hang:Yes
Packaging:Ships in a Box
Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.
Handling:Ships in a box. Art prints are packaged and shipped by our printing partner.
Ships From:Printing facility in California.
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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. The structural influence of Florin Ciubotaru is also to be found within the work – ridden of its’ post-surrealist networks and translated into an exhuberant chromatic expression, in the masterful textures that Virtosu is creating („Botanique Hypnotique”- 2019, "Pure Joy" - 2022, "Abstract Landscape" - 2019).
Artist featured by Saatchi Art in a collection
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