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 an expressionism of a social nature, as with Georg Grosz or Pascin. He discovered Western painting in books. The war in 1939, then communism, had a profound impact on him. In 1967, Aurel Cojan participated in the Sao Paulo Biennale with a series of drawings. Aurel Cojan came to live in Paris in 1969, after requesting political asylum. His first exhibition in Paris took place in 1978, at the Galerie Chevalier, followed by other exhibitions, Galerie Ralph and Galerie Jacques Barbier. His career is most atypical. Although he regularly exhibits in different galleries, several Parisian institutions own his works and his country recognizes his importance, notably 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, total freedom of life and painting. This freedom is the great virtue of his work. Coming from a figurative tradition halfway between expressionism and abstraction, shaken by the discovery of great American painting and its examples of formal radicality, his painting, as it developed in Paris, presents itself under the exterior of a colorful “writing” 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 sweetness 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 the painting seems to be a living thing. Several public collections have his works: National Museum of Bucharest, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, National Fund for Contemporary Art Type: Gouache Style: 1990 Genre: Abstract Characteristics: On Paper Theme: Abstract