Auto, 1993

Aurel Cojan  

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 in 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 Biennale with a series of drawings.

Aurel Cojan came to live in Paris in 1969, after having requested 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 unusual. If he exhibits regularly in different galleries, if several Parisian institutions have his works and if his country recognizes his importance, in particular 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, 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, is presented 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 kind of pictorial "savagery" of an impressive power, and the sometimes ecstatic, sometimes melancholy sweetness, of 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 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 of Contemporary Art.