Guy Pellerin : Painting Distance (A Mental Construction Made Visible)

Guy Pellerin’s painting reveals itself in an extremely close relationship with those who engage with it. What is made visible in colour eloquently raises the question of the subject. The source subject — that which is painted — no longer exists, or exists only in absentia. Indeed, what is represented appears as an affect: for Pellerin, colour is the vector of an emotion tied to an intimate experience. One could think of his work as a kind of topography of memory, its loci, its sensations, its vibrations.

In a body of work developed and honed over thirty years, Pellerin has chosen to focus on the surface, a surface that appears, one might say, as the outcome of a process that bares its reliefs and hollows, a kind of mental construction made visible, which acts upon our memory by calling on our experience of colour and its embodiment.