DAVID AZUZ (1942 - )

  David Azuz, who was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1942, has the enviable life of an artist living in one of the most beautiful capitals of Europe, Paris. He has lived in Paris since 1958 and returns to Tel Aviv each summer.

David Azuz has developed a style rich in color. His paintings are masterfully drawn and full of curiosity for the simple details of life. Azuz's subjects in bistros and markets, whether they be in Rome, Paris, Tel Aviv or elsewhere, express the solitude of the individual. They become symbolic of the universal citizen and are deeply moving in their pathos and search for themselves.

In order to capture the ambiance of the markets and bistros, Azuz gets up at dawn to paint from lite. He usually works late at night in the Paris cafes in search of those characteristic attitudes of the bartenders and patrons, which tend to blossom at this time of the evening, for instance, young couples in love, hiding their romance in the corner of a bistro or old ladies getting a little warmth from the anisette they sip slowly to make time go a long way. It is a world claustrophobic and vacant and, at the same time, certainly full of contradictions. In such a world, it is comforting to meet an artist who has not indulged in fashion by abstracting the patterns of life, but. on the contrary, has used his knowledge of classical drawing and, above all, his passionate temperament to communicate to us the simple gestures of life which most have forgotten to do for a long time. Contemporary art has been described as decadent. If it is indeed so, perhaps an artist of the calibre of David Azuz can help point the way out.