The painter Aurel Cojan, was born in 1914 in Beceni in Romania. He died in November 2004 in Paris. His first works around 1933, denote a social expressionism, as with Georg Grosz or Pascin. He discovers Western painting in books. The war in 1939, then communism marked him deeply. In 1967, Aurel Cojan took part in the Sao-Paulo Biennial with a series of drawings. Aurel Cojan came to live in Paris in 1969, after asking for political asylum. His first exhibition in Paris took place in 1978, at the Chevalier gallery, followed by other exhibitions, Galerie Ralph and Galerie Jacques Barbier. His career is one of the most atypical. While exhibiting regularly in various galleries, while several Parisian institutions own his works and while his country recognizes his importance, in particular by devoting 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 by paying the price, a total freedom, of life and of painting. This freedom is the great virtue of his work. Coming from a figurative tradition halfway between expressionism and abstraction, heckled by the discovery of great American painting and its examples of formal radicalism, his painting, as it developed in Paris, presents itself under the exterior of a "writing" colorful where the figurative signs explode and are transformed almost entirely into abstract configurations. This writing oscillates between an incredible virulence, a sort of pictorial "savagery" of impressive power, and the sometimes ecstatic, sometimes melancholy softness of the works on paper, where the color is veiled. But whatever its register, a work by Aurel Cojan can be recognized by the fact that painting there seems to be 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