Michel Pellus, 1945

Canadian painter Michel Pellus, born in Montreal, descends from a long line of artists. His grandfather Guillaume Pellus, born in Reims, France, who is listed in the Benezit as an artist and restorer of stained glass after the first World War, emigrated to Canada where he worked as a master artist in stained glass. Michel Pellus’ father, Raymond Pellus also born in France, was an artist and professor in Montreal for thirty-five years, while his mother, Tina Roy is a painter in Miami, Florida. At 27 years of age, Pellus decides: “Painting will be my life”.

Although autodidactic, Pellus reveals himself as a dazzling, gifted technician, as well as an alchemist of color and form. A phenomenal talent bled-white by existence, a dream searcher, a wizard of the marvelous and a klondike gold-panner of the imaginary, he henceforth establishes himself without any doubt as a major artist of his generation. 1 Constantly evolving and progressive, Pellus’ themes present different phases as being as many unific facets of his rich personality. In one of his ever evolving cycles, Pellus’ work is subjective and sociologically Hyper-realistic, describing the raw realism the emotive tension, of human relationships in the typical North American setting. Thus, in works like “Rooftop”, “Refuge Chez Elie”, or “Power of the City”, it is the whole sociological hyper-realism by Pellus which beckons us, grasps us and obliges us to participate in this world of urban tensions where one can discern and profoundly feel the mood of anguish, the unwontedly contorted or the solitary sadness of human contact.

In his current cycle, Pellus’ works offers a stunning testimony to what seemed an impossible marriage of the grand and small. Pellus feels mass media has been a great influence Pellus is the billboard. A face or fruit enlarged to a preposterous size becomes an eye catching image and the smallest detail grows more important. Cropping and his zoom lens approach first used in his character studies and city scenes is visually startling and again this technique is used in his florals. It is fascination to watch this phenomenon at work as he clarifies and idealized his subject in order to make the image symbolic; a symbol that can mean different things to different people rather than a sign that is the same to all people. Who else would choose to paint a common daisy and who else would expand it to gargantuan size, crop it and then float it horizontally on a sea of green! -