Opening Un Monde de Couleurs Paintings by David Kessel

The Lisbon-based Parisian David Kessel (b. 1955) was born from the environments of the shtetls (small Jewish villages in Russia or Poland) where the sound of kleizmer music echoes, alongside the writing of Chaïm Potok and the paintings of Chagall. A descendant of Holocaust survivors, his father had been deported to Auschwitz and his mother lived under the stigma of the yellow star during the dark hours of Nazi occupation. Little by little, his themes diversified and music, nature, animals, cafés and Amerindian culture became recurring objects in his work alongside Judaism.
Although in the 1970s he moved into advertising design and illustration, the pictorial element has become the basis of his writing and the image his privileged axis. The first feeling you get when looking at this artist’s paintings is an impression of joy and jubilation at his themes and frank explosions of colour, which many critics associate with Fauvism. His works are not only referenced in Akoun and Artprice, but can also be found in private and public collections such as the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, Havana’s National Museum of Fine Arts, the Royal Art Museum in Marrakech, the Grémio Lusitano and the Musée de La Poste in France.