Roman Cotoşman

of perception, with the transition from the sensorial to the spiritual experience in art, with the relational dynamic experiences occurring between “the artistic structures and the onlookers through their active involvement in the reception of the visual message”, his work predicates a pioneering practice in Romanian art at the beginning of the 1960s, influencing the Timișoara circle of artists, such as Paul Neagu, Diet Sayler, Ștefan Bertalan and Constantin Flondor. A short stay in Paris in 1963 brought him close to geometrical and lyrical abstraction, concrete and kinetic art, structuralism. The experiments he conducted during 1963–1965 in the series of monochrome collages and monotypes “Kinetic Art Projects (Spatial Interferences and Visual Sequences)” explored the relationship between order and chaos, the mechanics of chance and indeterminacy. In 1965, Cotoșman became interested in establishing a kinetic-constructivist art group following the model of the Groupe de Recherche D’Art Visuel from Paris. Together with Ștefan Bertalan and Constantin Flondor, he founded the group 1+1+1 in 1966. The group shared the individuality (oneness) of each artist, involving a visual working methodology based on constructive principles and on “a prospective-experimental method”. The group praxis proposed to engage in interdisciplinary visual research, transforming the artwork in an open system of communication that merged various fields such as bionics, semiotics, cybernetics and informational theories. Cotoșman started in 1966 to experiment with light projections on mirrors and striped glass in order to create an open, rhythmical spatial ambient as the one presented at Teatrul Mic in Bucharest. In 1968, he writes a manifesto for Kinetic art titled “Kinetic Art. A Prospective Instrumental Language”. In 1969, he participated with the 1+1+1 Group at the Nuremberg Biennale “Constructive Art: Elements and Principles” where he presented the prototype of a luminous-dynamic ensemble titled “Quaternar I” which reflects his focus on creating dynamic environments and affects the human sensorial and cognitive system. After the Nuremberg Biennale, he decided not to return to Romania and settled in Philadelphia in 1972. The mode of expressions of his art continued the constructive, geometrical direction, embodying this time an impulse to work on permutations and combinations of elements, analyzing the repetition of lines and their joining, such as “Tensioned Games,” 1970–1975/76, “Decentered Games,” 1979–1980. The specific appropriation of the theory of game determined the thinking of a visual grammar that attempted to avoid the center. This led to the appearance of a series of monochrome wooden or metal black reliefs which discuss the concept of void as a seed of creation. After 1988, color entered in the space of his oeuvre and determined a transformation of the bidimensional surfaces into distinctive volumetric objects. The abstract, ascetic hypostasis of form becomes a score, a notation which is repeated, it is placed in a rhythmical succession or in tension, its drawing, color, its spatial-temporal relations producing a reality in itself. A.Se.