Painter, poet and musician, Gili Mocanu is the promoter of a total and radical art, both in the sense of art for art’s sake and art for the market. He graduated from the National University of Arts Bucharest in 1999 and received his Master’s degree in 2000 with the exhibition Gili a murit (“Gili died”). Gili thinks, paints, writes and sells, becoming since 2008, the local cultural face of one of the world’s leading corporations. Preoccupied with the intersection between sign and drawing, Gili Mocanu employs light, shadow and line for self-representation through the image. Engaging in various acts of anti-representation in painting, he optically reinvents visual structures through artificial colouring, exceeding dimensions and intensities. The high level of simplification and elimination characteristic of his canvases complicates reality, without offering solutions – the only conviction is that of the absolute painting. Gili Mocanu exhibited at museums and art galleries in Romania, Germany, Austria, the United States, Portugal, France and Estonia. In 2004 he received the Margareta Sterian Prize for plastic creation from the National Museum of Art of Romania, and a year later he was nominated for the international Henkel EEC Prize for Art in Vienna. He was one of the founders – alongside other artists and critics like Oana Tănase and Matei Câlția – of the artistic group and gallery Galeria deInterese, later to become Galeria Posibilă.