The painter Aurel Cojan was born in 1914 in Beceni, Romania. He died in November 2004 in Paris. His first works around 1933, denote an expressionism with a social character, like those of Georg Grosz or Pascin. He discovered Western painting in books. The war in 1939, then communism, had a profound effect 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 Chevalier gallery, followed by other exhibitions, Galerie Ralph and Galerie Jacques Barbier. His career is most atypical. Although he regularly exhibits in various galleries, several Parisian institutions own his works and his country recognizes his importance, 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 by paying the price, a 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 radicalism, his painting, as it developed in Paris, presents itself under the appearance of a colorful "writing" where the figurative signs burst and are transformed almost entirely into abstract configurations. This writing oscillates between an unheard-of virulence, a sort of pictorial "savagery" of impressive power, and the sometimes ecstatic, sometimes melancholic gentleness 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 like a living thing. Several public collections have his works: National Museum of Bucharest, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, National Fund of Contemporary Art Type:Gouache Style:1990 Genre:Abstract Characteristics:On Paper Theme:Abstract