Opening Un Monde de Couleurs Paintings by David Kessel

A descendant of Holocaust survivors, with a father who was deported to Auschwitz and a mother who lived under the stigma of the yellow star and the dark hours of the Nazi occupation, the paintings of Parisian artist David Kessel (1955), now living in Lisbon, are inspired by the shtetls, small Jewish villages in Russia and Poland, where the sound of klezmer music echoes, the writings of Haïm Potok and the paintings of Chagall. Little by little, his themes diversified and, alongside Judaism, music, nature, animals, cafés and Amerindian culture became recurring objects in his work. Although he dabbled in advertising design and illustration in the 1970s, Kessel now bases his writing on painting and focuses primarily on images. The first feeling one gets when looking at this artist’s paintings is one of joy and jubilation at their themes and explosions of bold colours, which many critics associate with Fauvism. His works are included in private and public collections, such as the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba, the Royal Museum of Art in Marrakesh, the Grémio Lusitano Museum and the Postal Museum in France.