Rone: „Art is my own abstraction“ Rone (Cicerone Florin Cojocaru, born in 1968) graduated the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1994. From 1995 to 2006, he lived in Paris, where he worked with various galleries and participated in contemporary art salons, such as Fresnes 1996 and Montrouge 1997.

Over the past years, he had wellreceived personal exhibitions in Bucharest and Berlin. Today, his works are part of private collections throughout the world, among which the contemporary art collection of Raiffeisen Evolution Bucharest and Microsoft Romania. A self-described storyteller (“I never liked to paint in a certain style, under a sign of my own. That is not what I am interested in. I create stories”), Rone looks at the world through the lens of his artistic sensibility, and picks the “words” of his stories from the spectrum of colours and painting techniques. His current exhibition, hosted by The Art of Living Gallery, is made up of portraits of the series of paintings Dreamers and Friends from Beyond. Along with another series, Dwarfs, these works form a trilogy dedicated to the human self, the artist confesses.

Paraphrasing the words of Picasso, who once said “I do not search, I find”, Rone says “I search perpetually” and here is how he succinctly describes his style: “Conceptual problems are not at the forefront of my paintings, I rather try to find, for each artwork, a specific plastic solution, allowing myself the freedom to choose a theme that I solve differently from one painting to another. My artistic creation is dominated by abstract expression, which is accompanied by figurative allusions, representing however just a means to escape in a painterly world governed by style.”