BIOGRAPHY – CORNEL BARSAN
Cornel Barsan was born in nineteen sixty-five in Brașov, Romania, in that city of the Carpathians where Central Europe winds around Gothic churches, and from childhood he felt the call of creation, the urgency to give form to what manifested in him, to that persistent vision of the world that demanded to be painted, sculpted, transformed into image, into matter, into artistic presence. Between nineteen ninety-one and nineteen ninety-six, he studied art in Brașov, in the studios of masters Radu Daranga and Vasile Chinschi, learning techniques, absorbing tradition, but also developing his own vision, his own creative urgency, and thus his artistic journey began, first in Romania with the great National Salons of Art where his works appeared regularly since nineteen ninety-four.
But life is movement, transformation, displacement — and Cornel left Romania, he settled in France, in Paris, that city which would become his artistic homeland, his place of creation, his space of reflection, and since November two thousand three, for more than twenty years now, he has continued to paint, to create, to explore, and Paris offered him the possibility of exhibiting in the greatest institutions, the most prestigious galleries, from the Museum of the Grande Chartreuse to the National Library of Romania, from personal exhibitions to collective retrospectives, and his works have found place in the most prestigious public collections — the Vatican, the Victoria Palace of Bucharest (seat of the Romanian Government), the Roman Catholic Archdiocese — testimony to the recognition, the scope, the importance of his work.
Beyond traditional painting, Cornel explored other creative territories — sculpture, digital art, and between two thousand ten and two thousand fourteen, he conducted in-depth studies on digital art, seeking to understand how technology could serve artistic vision, how the digital could reveal new dimensions of creation. Then, between two thousand sixteen and two thousand eighteen, he embarked on radical experimental research: the development of a new type of paint color, based on concrete, which he called “Concrete Colours,” with remarkable properties — resistance to the elements, extreme flexibility, possibility of use on vertical surfaces, which revolutionizes the possibilities of mural painting, and this obsessive research, this will to invent, to transform, to push limits, that is what characterizes Cornel Barsan — not the acceptance of what exists, but the ceaseless creation of new forms, new materials, new possibilities of saying the world through art.
Today, at sixty years old, Cornel continues to paint, to create, to bear witness, living in Paris but always rooted in his poetic, philosophical, existential vision of the world, and his forty-five paintings created between two thousand two and two thousand twenty-five form a visual journal of an epoch, of a consciousness, of a life devoted to art as a form of understanding, of resistance, of beauty.