WIN Gallery: Many people associate collecting with the idea of beauty or aesthetic value. For you, what criteria matter when you decide to acquire a work? What needs to be present for you to feel that a work “remains”?
F.D.: I do not seek beauty in the classical sense, nor value confirmed by the market. When a work “remains,” it is because it manages to communicate with me. Sometimes it is the chromatics, other times a subtle message, other times an emotion difficult to formulate. I approach a painting as I would an open text: I try to decipher it, to understand its internal tensions. I do not seek certainties, but resonance.
WIN Gallery: Are there works in your collection that are linked to a clear biographical moment, to a period or to a change? To what extent does the collection become, unintentionally, a personal journal?
F.D.: Without intending it, the works that surround me come to mark stages of my own biography. They are connected to encounters, to moments of clarity or change. They are not simple chronological markers, but true keys to my personality, indications of how I thought, felt, and related to the world at different moments in life. I clearly remember the early 2000s, when I had a revelatory encounter with the director of the Art High School in Sibiu, Eugen Dornescu. Perhaps he offered me, without explicitly intending to do so, one of the first keys to reading art as a form of inner construction. The dialogues held at that time, with the painter Eugen Dornescu and with the teachers of the art department, the way art was discussed not as a domain reserved for elites, but as an exercise in disciplining sensitivity, helped me understand that one’s gaze is educated, and emotion is refined over time. That encounter contributed to my awareness that the relationship with a painting is not accidental: it says something about you, about the moment you are in, about your level of openness and understanding. In this sense, any collection inevitably becomes a personal journal, not of external events, but of inner transformations.
WIN Gallery: Some collectors seek discretion, others direct dialogue with the artist. How do you position yourself in relation to those whose works you collect? Does it matter to you to know the person behind the work?
F.D.: Dialogue with artists moves me deeply. My encounter with the painter Iacob Lazăr was essential in my maturation as a lover of art. His studio, where I had the great joy of being present countless times, was a space of stories about the world, about vocation, about the effort of becoming an artist. Even the coffee from those moments has remained unique. There I learned to look more attentively, to recognize influences, movements, continuities. The works of the painter Horia Cucerzan, whom I also met in an art gallery in Sibiu, attracted me through this capacity not to exhaust themselves at first sight. They seem to settle into a deep layer of memory and to return, after years, with new meanings. The visit to his studio was accompanied by an effervescent discussion about creation. Likewise, discovering the painter Hamid Nicola Katrib opened my interest toward cultural intersections, toward art as the result of a plural identity. For me, the artist’s biography is important: I read it in order to understand form and color more deeply. A painting is a testimony of life.
WIN Gallery: Contemporary art often involves a degree of uncertainty, both aesthetic and financial. How do you relate to this risk? Is it something that attracts you, or rather something you approach with caution?
F.D.: Painters are often beyond their own time, and their creativity can be provocative, unsettling, or difficult to decode at first encounter. Contemporary art, by its very nature, implies a degree of uncertainty, and this should not be seen as a weakness of the viewer, but as an invitation to learning. I am aware that there are works aligned with global trends that I do not fully understand or immediately resonate with, and I accept this limitation without turning it into refusal. Thinking of my students, I am convinced that they will relate differently to art, will have another emotional register, other interpretative tools, and perhaps a greater openness toward the artistic languages of the present. That is precisely why I believe our role is not to force understanding, but to accompany them in the process of approaching modern and contemporary art: to offer contexts, reference points, dialogue, and time. Art does not impose itself, it is discovered. And this discovery becomes truly valuable when it is accompanied by trust, curiosity, and patience.
