The painter Aurel Cojan was born in 1914 in Beceni, Romania. He passed away in November 2004 in Paris. His early works from around 1933 show an expressionism with a social character, similar to that of Georg Grosz or Pascin. He discovered Western painting through books. The war in 1939 and then communism deeply marked him. In 1967, Aurel Cojan participated in the São Paulo Biennale with a series of drawings. Aurel Cojan moved to Paris in 1969 after requesting political asylum. His first exhibition in Paris took place in 1978 at the Chevalier gallery, followed by other exhibitions at the Ralph Gallery and the Jacques Barbier Gallery. His career is quite atypical. While he regularly exhibits in different galleries, several Parisian institutions own his works and his country acknowledges his significance, notably by dedicating a retrospective to him at the Romanian Cultural Center in Paris in 1999, Aurel Cojan remains fiercely independent. He knows how to preserve, with the greatest insolence and at a cost, total freedom in life and painting. This freedom is the great virtue of his work. Coming from a figurative tradition that occupies a space between expressionism and abstraction, shaken by the discovery of great American painting and its examples of formal radicalism, his painting, as it developed in Paris, presents itself as a "writing" in color where figurative signs burst forth and almost entirely transform into abstract configurations. This writing oscillates between an unprecedented virulence, a kind of pictorial "savagery" of impressive power, and the sometimes ecstatic, sometimes melancholic softness of works on paper, where the color becomes veiled. But regardless of its register, a work by Aurel Cojan is recognizable in that the painting seems a living thing. Several public collections own his works: National Museum of Bucharest, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, National Fund for Contemporary Art.