The posthumous exhibition of Raymond Israel (1924-2016) has been inaugurated, now underway and can be visited until 5 February 2023, in the halls of the ATM Foundation in Milan, in the presence of the President of the Francesco Viola Foundation and Francesco Caroprese, Vice President of the Order of Journalists of Lombardy.
Over twenty large canvases chosen from hundreds of paintings that give an idea of the singular and somewhat hidden work that the artist enlivened especially in the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition is entitled “The buzz of the world”, as despite its abstract impact, the matter whirls with expressionistic spots in the canvases, giving an idea of an ideal landscape that Israel often wanted to sample throughout its journey. And so this exhibition today in Milan pays tribute to a great figure of Italian painting who already Giorgio Kaisserlian, an illustrious critic, in the 1960s akin to an informal naturalism.
Here I repeat what I wrote about the artist Raymond Israel: “To Nietzsche
we owe the idea according to which the great work of art speaks to us when in every feature, in every detail, we can think of it and experience it in different ways. Art often moves in the sphere of the inexpressible, however it gives us the elements to discover where, when, how the work was created. In a more immediate way, it lets us know the artist’s situation and state of mind. And it is precisely these elements that move us around the artistic career of Raymond Israel, a lively and cultured, intense and industrious, creative and ingenious journey. His pictorial apprenticeship took place in Milan in the 1950s and exactly at the Brera Academy, a pupil of Pompeo Borra; but it is in the years between the late 1950s and the early 1960s that Raymond Israel experiences that movement of artistic currents, not only Italian, but some also on an international level. In 1958 he held his first exhibition in the famous historic Barbaroux gallery in Via Santo Spirito in Milan and in 1960 again 
a beautiful exhibition at Palazzo Durini still in Milan. A sort of consecration
pictorial for the young artist who entered the art world with the support of the most alert critics. At the time, his work was grafted into the informal climate, or rather it is better to say that Israel was moving in the midst of the Informal season, in which the ideas of the art historian and critic Francesco Arcangeli gravitated, who builds his hypothesis of “Ultimo naturalism” or even of what has been called “Padan naturalism” as in the two essays published in the journal Paragone: “The Last Naturalists” (1954) and “A Non-Improbable Situation” (1956); but our artist was already leaving the Italian provinciality to look beyond the Alps also thanks to the trips he often made, breathing the evolution of the informal into that American-style abstract expressionism. Many canvases of the time and of the Sixties reveal precisely the panic relationship with nature, the sense of the “two” (“the new painters 
they feel, they seek the ‘two’: the limit of our possibilities, natural religion”), which is then the pivot and nucleus of all the critical reflection carried out by Arcangeli, presenting the group of artists made up of Ennio Morlotti, Pompilio Mandelli, Sergio Vacchi, Vasco Bendini, Sergio Romiti, Mattia Moreni: “Our civilization and our participation in a moral upheaval, eg
for which the meaning of human action has become more mobile, and infinitely radiating towards the cosmos; an ever more interior and once again animistic concept of nature, the sense of an eternal osmosis between us and the universe, all this will no longer allow us to return to the lost paradise of Greek-Roman classicism or the Italian Renaissance” (Not an improbable situation, “Comparison”, 1956). The nature and landscapes of Israel supported by a clear ordering design maintain a sensitive 
reference to the visible, while looking at the principles of the informal, or at that generative node of an existential matrix that had shaken the Italian figurative culture, in consonance with that of Europe and the United States, starting from the second post-war period, in the decade 1950-1960. And the intimate reasons for these emotional traces entrusted to the canvases also harbor vague Vangogian echoes. Paintings that have a beautiful atmospheric rendering, with a tight transition of tones and stains, supported by a solid structure that, looking at Chighine and De Stael, are certainly declarations of winged spirituality, but constitute a fundamental step in the process of building a own artistic identity. The pictorial chapter that takes place between the end of the sixties and the very beginning of the seventies, to which Israel gives the name of Babylon, leaves light geometric shapes with curved lines that show a sensitive perception of space, often intersecting, in an almost empty two-tone layout -full. Variations of shapes, sharpness of the surfaces, which make us think on the one hand of the work of the American Donald Judd and on the other of a series of Italian artists who have experienced geometries not only in an optical way and in a global exercise of the perceptive faculties, but by pursuing an aesthetic novella of neoplasticism. Then again the poetry of nature, a fantastic liberation of shapes and colors, in which it expresses a powerful and compressed energy that involves the surrounding space. An artistic work mostly on the wave of abstract expressionism, in which he measured himself to extract a kind of essentiality of forms, thanks to this knowledge of reality created by painting; the volumes explored the spaces like living architectures, but Israel in the end gave up the nature of light to obtain spaces on which to concentrate the force of the gesture”.
The painter Raymond Israel was born in Alexandria of Egypt on June 3, 1924 into a Jewish family: Turkish father and Bulgarian mother. An excellent student in Alexandria, his father often makes him change schools in search of greater stimuli. Young, nonconformist, intolerant of society’s rules, he runs away from home and also experiences the kibbutz before his father forces him to return. In Alexandria he meets Janette, they get married and she will always remain a serene and stable support. When his father and relatives insist that Raymond participate actively in the family business, Janette will defend his choice to be a painter. Raymond arrived in London in 1948 where he began studying at St. Martins’ School of Arts. From 1949 to 1953 in Paris he attended the Academie des Beaux Arts with Prof. Narbonne. In 1953 Raymond and Janette are in Milan, here they find a hospitable atmosphere and so they decide to stop. They frequent the Lido and make many friends. Their house in viale Monte Rosa has a terrace where Israel can paint and devote himself totally to
painting. At the Brera Academy, he was a pupil of Pompeo Borra, who very much appreciated his rare fervor for work and study. Of refined culture, Israel admires the solutions and beautiful formal innovations of contemporary artistic currents. Israel wants to give his painting a form that is a sincere and concrete expression of his thoughts. One evening in Paris walking with a painter friend of his along the street of Isle St. Louis, with youthful fervor, they promise to continue painting along this line. He devoted himself body and soul to painting without worrying about exhibiting his works. In 1958, at the request of his father, an exhibition was set up at the Barbaroux Gallery in via S. Spirito in Milan. To the painter, who was still at the beginning of his career and therefore had not yet perfected his personal vision, the reviews recognize a talent admired by the playfulness of color and by the tonal relationships of an informal naturalism. A second exhibition was set up in 1960 at Palazzo Durini, also in Milan, with favorable opinions from the critics of the time. In reality Raymond was not interested in exhibiting but only in painting. His style evolves over time and in search of sincere expression. His painting ranges between abstract and informal expressionism, action painting, color field painting and material; Israel knows that art is the index of his time, but it remains as a fact, out of time. He uses various techniques going from the brush to the palette knife on canvases of considerable size. Among these is a genre that Israel calls Babylon, characterized by intersecting curved line shapes dating from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Raymond Israel spent the last years of his life in Paris and then in Venice, where he passed away on April 8, 2016. In 2022, a solo exhibition entitled “The buzz of the world” is held at the ATM Foundation in Milan in the Project ” New Atlas of the Arts” edited by Prof. Carlo Franza. Leonardo Borgese (1958), Mario Lepore (1960), Giorgio Kaisserlian (1960), Marco Valsecchi (1960) and Carlo Franza (2019) have written about his work.
Charles Franza