(2002)
Experimenting means getting out of a circle, experimeter. But, the thing is, there are more ways of getting out of the circle. Getting out of the circle by keeping the centre. And getting out of the circle by moving your centre. There are always experiments taking place at a smaller or bigger scales. I mean when there is no experiment at all, you are a little dead, meaning you don’t challenge yourself. You have to challenge yourself to keep yourself alive. If you’re not challenged and you rely on what you know, I do every day what I did yesterday without that extra of getting out the perimeter, of experimeter, maybe there should be a word that’s the opposite. Going deeper inside the perimeter you have, something imperimeter. The experiment is also something that can be very logical, but it can also be a challenge of your courage.

We see in art newspapers words that are automatically bandied about as good or bad. The experiment is generally thought to be a good thing. Tradition is generally seen as a bad thing. In my opinion, they both have a positive and a negative side. And an experiment can be a useless or a degrading one. As well as being something that helps you grow enormously. Tradition is the same. I mean traditionalism could be the fear of seeing life, the present and the movement.
But there is a thing that is the centre of that peremeter which needs to be nourished all the time, it needs to be kept alive.

(2019)
Being part of a group is something special. Because the group shapes you, it creates a certain education around the artists or its members, which is truly special. And I felt this in my experience in all the groups I’ve belonged to. When I was a teacher and the ones in the Noima group, one of which was Sorin, were students, I may have told them, maybe they knew a lot of what the Prolog group means. But I was trying to model them to be sensitive to the joy of being together. That being alone is one thing, and being together with a few colleagues, painting partners, is a joy and it means a lot. D2

So being part of a group doesn’t only mean stylistic affinity, it mostly means being friends with the others. Their friendship is very important. As proof, until Noima was set up in 2019, there were members that could be in the group, who said I can’t cope, I can’t be in the Noima group, they left it, others came and wanted it. That’s how this bunch of young people came about. What’s certain, and I think you all agree, is the spiritual affinity that binds them. The way of feeling life and the world and the painting in the same way, all of them. Even if stylistically now after seeing them after so many years, they can be separated really well, one from another. So they’re alike and also different, which is a good thing.

Speaking again as a psychologist rather than a painter, each of them had something personal and something in common. One is more dynamic, another one more sensitive... The age made them all alike in a way. They all wanted to be known. And this can be seen in the way you use the brush, in your brushstroke, also in your way of thinking. Apart from this desire to be heard or known, I dare say they were also linked by a certain modesty. This desire didn’t go as far as scandal and rudeness. They each knew their place.

The group shapes you, it creates a certain education around its artists, or its members, which is truly special. And I felt this in all my experience, in all the groups I’ve belonged to. Knowing how to enjoy somebody else’s results. It makes you altruistic. It makes you shape somehow the drawback that all the artists have, egocentrism. A certain egocentrism was always left aside, in relation to the joy that the Prolog group, or the Noima group, or the Sigma group accomplished something good. So this was another very important lesson I learned from belonging to a group.