Descrizione Opera / Biografia
Gheorghe Virtosu’s way of being in the world combines to perfection a straightforward and down-to-earth nature with a mystical and mysterious streak. His passionate nature has always urged him to follow intellectual and deeply spiritual pursuits, and therefore becoming a children’s author has fulfilled a heart-felt personal need, whilst at the same time bridged a gap in the market. From the very beginning, Gheorghe Virtosu’s writing has eluded all canonisation, contemporary and classical, since it cannot be labelled as belonging to any of them for definite.
A self-taught artist, Gheorghe Virtosu was born on April the 14th 1968, in a small village in Basarabia, within a loving Romanian family. When he was only 15 years of age, he decided to leave home and continue his education at a town college a few good miles away from home. In doing so, he came against many adversities, while having to comply with a very strict discipline imposed by the school, mostly through a very active and physically demanding sportive schedule. In the end, however, the active sporty life style he led in college served him in good credit for the compulsory military service which followed soon after graduation. Having envisaged a military career for himself, Gheorghe Virtosu took very seriously his physical training, as well as the military service. As a result, Gheorghe ended up as a resilient character, forged in the furnace of military training, but ready to tackle head-on any other challenges which life might have thrown at him. After the fall of the Communist system in USSR, Gheorghe resigned from the army and went abroad in search for a new life, like most of the young people of Easter-European background.
After having travelled the world far and wide, thus achieving one of his childhood dreams rendered as impossible for anyone growing up behind the Iron Curtain, Gheorghe Virtosu eventually chose Britain as his adoptive country, settling down in London and acquiring British citizenship after a few years.
In 2004, Gheorghe Virtosu was detained by the French authorities. At the end of a long and costly investigation, he was accused of having created one of the greatest networks of immigration in Europe since The Great War. During his imprisonment, the children’s literary series A Little Frog’s Heart has come to life. A very prolific and thoroughly entertaining book written for children of all ages, A Little Frog’s Heart spans over 85 volumes out of which over 10 have been published in more than 10 languages, with the rest of them soon to follow suit.
On the 7th of June 2015, Gheorghe Virtosu was again detained by the Belgian authorities, this time, on suspicion of tax fraud. While a complex international investigation was conducted, Gheorghe Virtosu was kept in isolation without any possibility of communicating with the outside world for fear that the outcome of the investigation might be compromised.
Born under the bold sign of Aries, Gheorghe Virtosu is hardly a man to be kept down by any circumstances. Although deprived of his freedom of movement, his mind and spirit soared up to heights of creative power never reached before. As a result of his confinement in isolation, Gheorghe Virtosu came up with two new novels in the first 14 months of his imprisonment. After a period of intense creative strain, Gheorghe Virtosu found himself at his wits’ end, experiencing mental and physical fatigue. In the remaining time of his incarceration, he kept on sketching ideas and characters which would later on come to life in his writings.
As we can see, art and literature have become Gheorghe Virtosu’s chosen ways of rebelling against injustice and miscarriage of justice occurring in the world. His utmost gesture of defiance was his successful break-out of his solitary confinement followed by his granted request of sanctuary in native Basarabia who guarantees his protection to this day.
Gheorghe Virtosu was confronted with and defeated unimaginable hardship, but more importantly, he managed to channel all his anger and frustrations and turned them into art: an elegant way of rising above the ugliness of the world. Writing has become the most effective form of therapy, an effective way of dealing with frustration, loss and anger. The author has found in art an ideal form of elevating negative emotions and transforming them into rewarding projects meant to spread and replenish happiness and a zest for life.
Alternating a life lived in freedom with life in solitary confinement, Gheorghe Virtosu has taken on the challenge of adapting to both ways of existence and has successfully managed to have time tick over in his favour.
Engaging with all kind of challenges at different levels, Gheorghe Virtosu not only maintained his integrity of spirit, but also added value to his art and gained new perspectives, like a fine diamond which, skilfully cut, reflects back the light in unexpected ways. Just like a lotus flower, or a water lily, his roots dig deep in the mire, but his intellect defies the heights of creative thinking, allowing him to outsource and practise his art and hobbies.
While his cutting-edge literary style asserts itself as refreshingly unique within the literature of the world, Gheorghe Virtosu surprises us, yet again, with his recently found taste for thematical painting which approaches topics from different cultures, thus introducing a diverse view of the world. Each piece is singular and carries a genuine complexity of meaning which requires its own code for deciphering it.
Ranging from gritty and brush, to poetical and ethereal, the characters in Gheorghe Virtosu’s paintings are free spirits of nature caught in a game of multiculturalism and plural voices which join in together to produce divine harmonies of colour and meaning. These paintings are like nothing we have seen before: dressed up in hooded cloaks, equipped with weapons which look like magical devices and displaying a puzzling other-worldly demeanour, the characters tell us nothing about themselves, and everything about the universe they belong to. But they are very sparing with who they are letting in: unequivocally, they invite the audience to actively engage with art at more than one level and lead the way to first-hand experiencing aesthetic knowledge, sensorial and intuitive perception.
Gheorghe Virtosu’s art is a vibrant living manifestation of the world around.
