Galerie Paul Prouté

Julius Baltazar had his first exhibition in Paris at the age of sixteen. He was named Baltazar because of Salvador Dali, who introduced him to literary and artistic circles in 1967 and introduced him to Fernando Arrabal. The three of them then founded the Intra realist movement known by a single exhibition of collages and unusual objects. After a first training in jewelry, he discovers, through his friend Pierre Dmitrienko, the techniques of intaglio engraving with Georges Visat, editor of the surrealist painters in Paris – Max Ernst was the first collector of works on paper by Julius Baltazar – then Alain Piroir, who then became his intaglio engraver. In the 1970s, the artist met many painters: Marfaing, Cortot, Debré, Ubac, Saura, Benrath, Laubiès. From 1975, he definitively asserts himself as a lyrical abstract painter. He gave equal importance to color and line. Other encounters, just as decisive, are those with the author and art critic Guy Marester, the bookseller-publisher Jacques Matarasso in Nice, or the publisher André Biren in Paris. Then begins a rich collaboration with writers and poets. Among them, Michel Butor, Michel Bohbot, Lucien Scheler, Michel Déon, Eugène Guillevic. Julius Baltazar conceives and realizes with them printed, painted and handwritten books. The atmospheric and celestial dimension of his handwritten paintings inspires men of letters who come with pleasure to decorate them with their texts or their verses.