SHORT BIO
Pellarose is a Swiss-based contemporary artist working at the intersection of photography, digital composition, and mixed media. His practice — which he calls Digital Alchemy — builds images through successive layers of photographic superimposition, pushing color and contrast to their structural limits. Each work is unique in process and unrepeatable. His series include Icons & Illusions, Gods, Great World, and Hidden Faces. Select works incorporate hand-painted acrylic interventions and original calligraphy by Cathy Yersin. Pellarose is represented by Samhart Gallery, Switzerland. Limited editions are produced with Eloxal Prints, Zürich, and Photolabs Athens. Works held in private collections in Switzerland, the United States, and Europe.
LONG BIO
Pellarose is the working name of Louis Boyera, an artist based between Switzerland and Greece. His practice draws on photography as raw material rather than final form — each image is subjected to a process of radical reconstruction he calls Digital Alchemy: layered superimposition, chromatic saturation pushed beyond representation, until the source becomes unrecognisable and something new emerges.
His series Icons & Illusions deconstructs the image of cultural icons — Romy Schneider, Frida Kahlo, Miles Davis, Vivien Leigh among others — not as portraiture but as an inquiry into how public figures are constructed, consumed, and gradually emptied of meaning. The Gods and Great World series extend this investigation toward myth, landscape, and the psychedelic excess of natural color.
A number of works exist in two states: as strictly limited Fine Art editions, and as unique originals bearing hand-painted acrylic interventions and original calligraphy by Cathy Yersin. These unique works are co-signed and represent a distinct body of work within the practice.
Pellarose holds a prior career as a Music Director and Conservatory Conductor — a background that shapes his understanding of composition, tension, and resolution in visual work.
Limited editions on anodized aluminium are produced exclusively with Eloxal Prints, Zürich. Fine Art paper editions are printed by Photolabs Athens on Ilford Cotton Artist Textured 310gsm with Epson UltraChrome Pro pigment inks, each accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Pellarose is represented by Samhart Gallery, Nyon, Switzerland, and exhibited internationally. Works are held in private collections in Switzerland, the United States, and Europe.
CONCEPT — Digital Alchemy
Digital Alchemy is not a filter, not a style, and not a post-production effect. It is a working method: the systematic layering of photographic material — portraits, textures, found images, architectural fragments — until the original source dissolves and a new visual reality takes its place.
Each layer adds or destroys information. Color is not corrected but pushed — saturation used as a structural force rather than an aesthetic choice. The process imposes its own discipline: no effect is ever repeated. Every work is the result of a unique sequence of decisions that cannot be reconstructed.
The result occupies a space between photography and painting, between the documentary and the imagined. Printed on aluminium or museum-grade Fine Art paper, the works carry the density of their construction in the surface itself — a physical record of the process that produced them.
