Biography
Paul Beel was born in Cleveland (Ohio) in 1970. He lives and works in Florence.
He studied painting at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, receiving a Masters of Fine Art degree in 1996. He continued his art studies in Italy at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, where he later taught painting and drawing. He has had solo exhibitions in Venice, Milan, Florence, Mantua, as well as in the United States, and group exhibitions in Spain, Germany, San Marino, Switzerland and throughout Italy. Since 1998 he has lived with his wife and two daughters in the countryside near Florence and exhibited with Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Mantua. Beel's pictorial language is a blend of ancient techniques and contemporary themes, with constant references to Caravaggio, Goya and Daumier. In particular, he managed to give an extraordinary relevance and intensity to the portrait genre, drawing from contemporary reality, with subjects taken from everyday life.
"My portraits are born like this: they are models taken from the street who take on the dignity of saints. My friends and the models who work in the graphics school where I teach pose for me".
Paul Beel's painting is both cold, ruthless, as hallucinated as a noir film or novel can be tense and hallucinated, yet also strangely full of complicated psychological gears that bring to mind something that we are never able to fully understand and grasp - something that has to do with our unconscious, with the mystery of our deepest (and often unknown, or at least denied, even to ourselves) individual and collective consciousness: in short, they are paintings which, through a single scene, a simple shot in full field, immobile and glacial, as only certain photographs of American portraitists can be immobile and glacial, a real flash on a person or on a group of banal everyday objects, open a gash, a flash of awareness on the part more intimate and secret than all of us.
