Born in Romania. Living in Rome. 
email:    sulgherudragos@yahoo.it

I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. I do not recall exactly when it started, it has simply always been there. It must have started as a child and never truly stopped. I guess growing up surrounded by art made it, in a way, inevitable. What we are exposed to in the earliest stages of life remains with us even when we are not aware of it. We absorb more than we choose and we make our own what initially belongs to others. The love for art belonged to my father. He had studied art in his youth and continued to draw and paint throughout his life. The first books I opened were books on art history. Old volumes, printed in Romania, entirely in black and white. Lascaux cave paintings, Titian, Vermeer, Soutine... That is how I first encountered them, through monochrome reproductions on worn pages. And in that form, nothing felt missing. Black and white was simply the first way I learned to see art. When I later encountered those same works in person, in museums such as the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Albertina, or the British Museum, something changed, but not entirely. The works were different, of course, but that first impression was never corrected or replaced. Both versions, old and new, remained together, layered.
And since my first encounter with art was monochromatic, it has stayed with me and shaped the way I look at things. I still work almost entirely in monochrome today, something that has remained from that first way of seeing.
 

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For years now I have been making mostly large-scale drawings on paper, using compressed charcoal, a simple, inexpensive but highly flexible medium, which allows for both precision and accident, for control and loss of control at the same time. These works are not designed to last in a strict material sense, as paper and charcoal remain unstable and fragile materials, but the large scale gives them presence, despite this fragility. They are not sketches or studies to be hidden in a drawer, but objects that occupy space, difficult to ignore, asking for pause and holding attention. There is also a practical reason for this scale. It allows me to work with broad gestures without focusing on detail. I have little patience and get bored quickly when I have to measure every single movement. The large format gives me freedom of movement and it keeps the process direct and physical.

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I have always been fascinated, in a simple and almost childish way, by shapes and forms, by light and shadow, by the way different elements can meet, collide and coexist on a flat surface. As Maurice Denis once said, “''a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order." What has always interested me is not so much what an image means, but how it is formed. For a long time I believed form came before content, and that meaning arrived later, if at all. Over time, it became clear that they do not follow one another. They develop together, overlap, and influence each other continuously, sometimes reinforcing one another, sometimes working against each other.
Although art feels deeply personal and intimate to me, like a quiet soliloquy, making it has never been truly spontaneous. It does not begin as a casual gesture or as a game with a pencil on paper. It usually starts from something defined, even if only faintly so. It starts from a visual impression, a compositional intuition, a general idea, often blurred, unstable, still forming. The first task is to understand where that initial idea might lead. Drawing becomes an attempt to clarify something that is not yet clear, even if complete clarity is never fully reached.

As I work, the initial idea transforms, shaped by thoughts, memories, and moods. They all come and go, they overlap and compete for attention. I recognise myself in a fragmented way of thinking, where attention shifts, returns, and drifts again. As Wisława Szymborska wrote, “I am a poor audience for my memory, I listen and don’t, step out, come back, then leave again.” I do not apply this to memory alone, but to thoughts and moods in general. I let them circulate without holding on too tightly. I let them be, and they return me the favor. Excessive introspection can be limiting, so I rarely rationalise art while making it, especially since I tend to do so in other areas of life. Ideally, art becomes a space of detachment, a way of keeping things open, light, and partly accidental, a space where things can happen without being immediately fixed or explained. And yet, at the same time, there is always a need for control. I decide format, composition and subject, I define the placement of forms, the balance of contrasts and the overall direction of the image. There is a structure, a framework set from the beginning, but this structure is not everything. During the process, unforeseen elements appear, small deviations, shifts in direction, decisions made in the moment. The material resists, the gesture changes, the hand adjusts and I add, remove, hesitate, insist... The work gets built gradually, while images emerge and disappear, forms take shape and dissolve. What emerges is neither pure control nor pure accident, but something in between, the result of a continuous negotiation between intention and its loss, in which neither side ever fully prevails. At a certain point, I stop. Not because the drawing feels finished, it never really does, but because, for the moment, it reaches a temporary and acceptable balance. In the end, the work does not correspond to what I had in mind at the beginning, but I no longer see this as a failure. It is simply the way the work comes into being.​
 

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I see the artist, first of all, as an observer, sometimes as a researcher and always, in a way, as a thief. I experience and consume more than I create. Much of my time is spent researching images that resonate with my own experience, something that feels known and recognisable, that carries a sense of familiarity. I absorb and elaborate them, adapting and using them as materials. In each drawing, different elements meet, overlap, integrate and change form. But I am not alone in this process. Every image has passed through others before reaching me, and it belongs to a continuous flow of images and ways of seeing, shared and transformed across time and people. Nothing arrives untouched, and nothing leaves unchanged. In this sense, working feels less like producing something new and more like taking part in an ongoing conversation that predates me and will continue after. Within it, I am a point where images pass, change and continue moving on. What I call “my work” is a temporary configuration within this flow, a moment in which certain elements come together and then disperse again. For this reason, I do not feel that my role is to create something entirely new from nothing. It feels closer to reorganising what already exists dispersed. The idea of being completely original feels more like a cultural construction, because every image is formed within a network of other images. Even when we think we are inventing something new, we are still moving within an existing language, made of forms, references, and traces that belong to a common visual language.We move within it, making small changes rather than starting from scratch. 

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I do not see my work as a direct way of communicating a message. The more I work, the more the idea of “saying something” begins to feel limiting. A drawing does not start in order to explain, it exists first as a visual experience. Its meaning appears in the act of looking. It does not belong entirely to me and it is not something I can fully control. In this sense, the work is a process more than it is a statement. It is not created to deliver a fixed, clear message, not because it is absent but because it is not the starting point. If the image itself is built through shifts and adjustments, then its meaning cannot be fixed in advance. It remains open, just as the process that produced it.

I am convinced that in art, the more one tries to communicate, the more communication risks becoming forced and reduced. What is too deliberate often loses intensity. But communication can take place differently, it can emerge indirectly, as a by-product rather than a goal. In this sense, the work remains part of the same circulation described earlier. Images are transformed in making and reinterpreted in viewing. What I produce is only one moment in this process, while the rest happens elsewhere, in someone else’s perception. This also means that the work does not need to be fully understood in order to function. It needs to be experienced. A drawing should be looked at in the same way a piece of music is listened to. They exist to be consumed. Whatever meaning arises does so through that experience.

Everything else, the explanations, the intentions, the context around the artist, remains secondary. It exists, but it is not essential. As Lu Nan said, “If the pictures are good, it doesn't matter who took them, and if the pictures are not good, it also doesn't matter who took them.”