Haifa (Israel) (AFP)

The face is hazy, hazy, but the blonde lock and the suit and tie leave no room for doubt: it is Donald Trump, from every angle, who lines the studio of the Israeli painter Iddo Markus, fascinated by the " tragic figure "of the former US president.

"First of all, know that I don't like him!", Insists the talkative artist, with the full beard and piercing black eyes in his studio in Haifa (northern Israel).

There are dozens, on the floor and on the walls, of portraits of Donald Trump painted on canvas or wood in a multitude of formats, including as small as identity photos.

When the Republican billionaire ran for the 2016 US presidential election, Iddo Markus “couldn't believe it”.

Then when Donald Trump was elected, the artist was "terrified", even "disgusted by the way he treated people and minorities".

But his eyes couldn't tear themselves away from the man "with yellow hair and an orange face," whose images and rhetoric flooded the media and social networks during his four-year tenure.

A first painting made on a corner of a table was followed by some 120 other canvases, still in oil, with a Donald Trump face as if erased but whose silhouette is immediately recognizable.

"The first paintings were much more colorful and done quickly," Mr. Markus, who studied painting in the United States, where he was born, and in Israel, told AFP.

- A "tragic" muse -

But after his loss in November to Democrat Joe Biden and the assault on Capitol Hill in Washington in early January by a crowd of his supporters, he looks more like a "pathetic" figure, says the artist.

"Lately, Trump has given rise to a different palette of emotions in me: he is like a tragic figure, with a more complex personality than a simple icon."

"We see him in his way of holding himself: it is as if, suddenly, he realized that he was a human being, fragile", after having taken himself for "God".

Iddo Markus would like to exhibit his portraits - a series he dubbed "The Apprentice" after the reality TV show "The Apprentice" which contributed to the popularity of Donald Trump who animated him - in a gallery or in a museum.

He has already sold several.

One of his works, for example, was acquired by an American Democrat who wanted to keep at home a memory of the "abyss" into which American democracy once descended, he explains.

In the mess of his studio, where the walls are covered with pinned sketches, cut-out photos, brushstrokes escaping from a canvas, Iddo Markus readily admits: He is "in the obsession, in everything that '(he does".

For proof: one day he came across a photograph of his wife, a child, in a pink dress.

It did not take more for him to grab his brushes and let his inexhaustible verve flow on small wooden squares or on huge canvases, to achieve the attractive result of 1,000 works in five years.

"I don't need drama, war, to paint, a photo is enough for me to embark on an adventure," he says.

"Portraituring Trump was an adventure ..."

© 2021 AFP