Paul Israel (1955)

Biography Paul Israel was born in 1955 in Paris, a year he considered not bad to come into the world. The Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, where he grew up, was a world in itself for the child he was. This wide avenue, lined with stalls and cars of all seasons, blended Brittany and the Orient, and opened onto passages with kaleidoscopic skylights. The colours of this street were those of life itself.

In 1971, Paul Israel passed the entrance exam to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and enrolled in the Gili workshop. It was there that he met the members of the "Bazooka" group. A year later, he participated with them and a few students from the Arts Appliqués in his first exhibition in Chelles, in Seine-et-Marne. From these distant collective exhibitions, he kept the memory of certain people and hung a few papers, invited to do so.

From 1972 onwards, Paul Israel often travelled on the roads of Europe, his hands in his pockets. These unpredictable and sometimes perilous journeys allowed him to acquire a sharp mind, a certain tact, and a vivid language. Crossing war-torn Greece and the Italy of the Years of Lead, he thus escaped the horror of mass tourism. In 1976, he brought together artists from the School around a magazine project, including Hervé Girardin, Olivier Lebars, Roland Monpierre, and Pierrille Tarnaud. In 1978, the first issue of the magazine "Le Vent" was published, followed by a series of magazines focused on the search for new relationships between text and image, including fifteen issues of "Les Berceaux étroits" from 1978 to 1985.

Paris was showing its last glows at that time. It was quite easy to live without working until the end of the 1970s, and finding a place to live was more of an exploration than a race to the abyss. In his group of friends, the spirit of surrealism was a binding force. Some of them knew or had known close associates of André Breton. Paul Israel never considered himself a surrealist, and the Situationist International had dissolved in 1972.

Thanks to a friend, he met the surrealist poet Claude Tarnaud, born in 1922. They spent nights talking at the Mas de Salignan, and Claude introduced him to the Belgian surrealist group of the time. Jacques Lacomblez invited him, along with Nelly, his lifelong companion, to spend a few days in his tall house in Brussels, where large birds passed by. Paul Israel was mostly interested in poets, whether they wrote, made films, did theatre, painted, or did nothing.

Paul Israel has had solo exhibitions in Paris, the Paris region, Avignon, and Auvergne, where he has lived since 2018 with Nelly. These exhibitions, along with those of his friends near and far, form a tenuous network where the precipitate of memory and surprise sometimes allows time to regain its prestige.