Guy Pellerin\u2019s 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\u200a\u2014\u200athat which is painted\u200a\u2014\u200ano 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.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the very source of Pellerin\u2019s work, colour and its architectural, structured rendering acts as an open referent where various levels of meaning may appear. This practice, wholly directed toward its absent object (that which is in question, that which is drawn from the real remains hidden, unrepresented) points toward sources filtered by memory and presents a subjective inventory to which the artist asks us to acquiesce. What is shown is a proposal, an abstract composition projected from the selected and quite real object. A fantasized reality projected onto surfaces conceived as screens\u200a\u2014\u200asuch a reading easily comes to mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The painting can take several forms. In no. 356\u200a\u2013\u200aCath\u00e9drale Saint-Charles-Borrom\u00e9e, Joliette<\/em> (2004),1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Guy Pellerin, La couleur d\u2019Ozias Leduc<\/em>, Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art de Joliette, Joliette (Qu\u00e9bec), September 12, 2004 to February 27, 2005.<\/span> Pellerin produces a random inventory of the colours present in the canvases of Quebec painter Ozias Leduc. He sets the somewhat faded colours onto monochrome surfaces lined up along the wall, devoid of any referent. Each of the forty-eight components suggests the nostalgic remains of an outmoded past and sustains our memory in its attempt to conjure up the works of Leduc, in whole or in part. Paradoxically, it is through the absolute pictorial practice of the monochrome that his cinema of memory unfolds. The object, the referent on which the collection is constructed, is excluded. With Pellerin, the sign is the trajectory of the perceived colour, ordered and recomposed, or rather, reinvented. He tends toward a recognition in the colour he shapes; he goes to colour to recognize himself through it, to experience it. Again, in no. 309\u200a\u2013\u200aLa couleur des lieux, Copenhague<\/em> (1997),2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - La couleur des lieux\u200a\u2013\u200aCopenhague<\/em>, Galerie Yves Leroux, Montr\u00e9al, Qu\u00e9bec, October 25 to November 29, 1997.<\/span> Pellerin draws us into a sensitive experience, here based on a location. After an extensive intimate exploration, and by means of a kind of \u201ctime regained,\u201d he manages to conjure up his experience of Copenhagen, again, by presenting it as units of colour. Pellerin evinces a manifest desire not just to show colour but to put it on display. On the smooth surface of his eleven monochromes, one can discern reminiscences, repentances\u200a\u2014\u200atimes past\u200a\u2014\u200ain the layered pentimento of colour applied beforehand. It is a long road to the final colour, one that reveals itself to light and recognition. What is signified is the process undertaken, traces of which become visible materials, inscribed in an implied temporality. Colour is a cognate of the Latin word celare<\/em>, to conceal, suggesting the idea that colour is what covers and hides the surface of something. Thus, the colour resulting from the process conceals the object (Leduc\u2019s painting) or the location (Copenhagen). In this sense, Pellerin is engaged in a dissimulation of the initial object. One may understand his work as functioning as an organizer of memory\u200a\u2014\u200ahis own\u200a\u2014\u200afocused on an object of study, which fully plays its role as referent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n