Bio

Dominic-Petru Virtosu creates paintings as if splicing together fragments of a vivid dream – moments of the everyday rearranged into new, impossible narratives. Firmly rooted in New Figuration, his practice allows representation to bend, mutate and exaggerate in service of emotional resonance rather than literal accuracy. Working primarily in oil, he constructs large-scale montages that transform ordinary life into vibrant, surreal tableaux.

His imagery emerges from what he calls “the library of his subconscious”: an evolving archive of pop-cultural references, memories, visual noise and intuitive flashes. Before becoming a full-time artist and later a tenured professor at the Ecole Superieure d’Art de Dunkerque/Tourcoing, in Northern France, Virtosu spent six years working in broadcast television and advertising. That experience refined his sensitivity to the seductive and absurd power of pop imagery – its immediacy, its cultural saturation and its potential to both reflect and distort contemporary life. These sensibilities permeate his canvases in unexpected and often humorous ways.

Themes of sensuality, nature and the anxieties of millennial existence flow through Virtosu’s work, yet he approaches them through a lens of curiosity and play. Even when he confronts the pervasive “doom-and-gloom” of his generation, he does so with color, exaggeration and a joyful twist.

Virtosu’s paintings invite viewers to inhabit the tension between the familiar and the fantastically strange. In this shifting space, his work reveals not only how we construct the world around us, but also how endlessly it can be reinvented.