My work is a process of social deconstruction: looking beyond appearances, beyond what is conventional or supposedly known. Celebrities are one of my favorite subjects. We rub shoulders with them, we think we know them, we think they are familiar. Instead, they are complete strangers, whose depth and complexity are just waiting to be exposed, explored, exploded.
My mission is to bring an original perspective to what everyone thinks they can see. By reclaiming legendary images and injecting them with subversive lettering, saturated color, and intimate gesture, I challenge the mythology of the icon — and, through it, our own.
Between deconstruction and tribute, between social critique and secret devotion, my work is a dialogue between the fame we consume and the humanity we so rarely see — whether found in the face of an icon, the raw pulse of the natural world, or the breath of ancient myth.”
bio
PELLAROSE — Louis Boyera
Louis Boyera, known as Pellarose, is a contemporary visual artist working at the intersection of iconography, visual culture, and architectural integration. Born in Lyon, France, he discovered photography as a child, captivated by the bold geometry and chromatic intensity of urban architecture — the raw materiality of concrete, the dialogue between light and form, the hidden poetry of the built environment. Deeply influenced by the modernist aesthetic of Le Corbusier, he developed early a singular visual sensibility where structure and emotion are inseparable.
At thirteen, he photographed Le Corbusier’s iconic chapel at Ronchamp and held his first exhibition — a defining moment that set the course of a lifelong artistic journey at the crossroads of urban art, color, and form. The child who pressed his eye to the viewfinder in Ronchamp never really stopped looking.
His work draws on the legacy of Pop Art — Keith Haring, Andy Warhol — while pushing into entirely new territory through what he calls Digital Alchemy: a process of radical transformation in which source images are deconstructed and reconstructed through saturated color, subversive lettering, and hand-applied interventions in collaboration with artist Cathy Yersin, whose calligraphic script and botanical gestures add a layer of intimacy and contradiction to each piece. The result is neither photograph nor painting, but something in between — works that inhabit the space where mass culture meets private obsession, where the familiar becomes strange, and where beauty reveals its shadow.
At the heart of this process lies a technique of deliberate superimposition — multiple image layers stacked as so many metaphysical planes of reading. Each layer reveals a different dimension of the subject: psychological, cultural, mythological. Visually, this creates a striking depth comparable to three-dimensionality — fluorescent colors and bold lettering push forward into the viewer’s space, while textural effects, grain, and underlying matter recede into shadow, generating a chromatic and spatial tension that makes each work alive on the wall.
Each work follows a self-imposed discipline: no filter, no effect is ever repeated. Every piece is singular in its process, giving each work an ephemeral, unrepeatable quality — like a drawing in the sand that disappears with the next wave, except that here, it stays.
Pellarose’s practice spans five distinct series. Icons & Illusions is a social deconstruction of public figures — from Barbie to Muhammad Ali, from Salvador Dalí to Audrey Hepburn — peeling back the mythology of the icon to reveal the duality, the fragility, the humanity beneath. Gods explores divinity, archetype, and the sacred through the lens of contemporary mixed media, in direct collaboration with Cathy Yersin whose sculptural and calligraphic interventions give ancient myth a new and urgent presence. Great World is a triptych of landscape series — Pacific, Amazonia, and Mediterranean — exploring the raw grandeur of the natural world through saturated light, spatial depth, and chromatic intensity. Behinds is a more provocative body of work, sensual and deliberately boundary-pushing, exploring the body as landscape and desire as a visual language. And Hidden Faces of Pellarose — a series of self-portraits created in collaboration with Cathy Yersin — offers a more intimate and introspective dimension to the practice, exploring identity, transformation, and the artist’s own place within the iconographic universe he has built.
Together, these five bodies of work form a coherent and ambitious universe where the contemporary and the timeless, the iconic and the personal, the cerebral and the sensory are in constant, productive tension.
His mixed media works are produced as limited editions on Fine Art Canson paper with Epson UltraChrome Pro pigment inks, and as exclusive industrial aluminum editions through EloxalPrints, Zurich — a premium format in which color penetrates the anodized surface, creating objects of rare material presence conceived for strong architectural integration in high-end residential and hospitality spaces.
Before dedicating himself fully to visual art, Pellarose spent thirty years as a Music Director and Conservatory Conductor — most notably serving as Director of the Conservatory of Guyana, South America, for eight years. That background in composition, structure, and interpretation continues to inform his visual practice in ways that are felt rather than seen. He has also directed two short films — Depths and Mysteries and Fly, Martin — both selected at international film festivals in Berlin, Los Angeles, and Moscow.
Pellarose is represented by Samhart Gallery, Switzerland, and is a selected artist of the Photolabs Athens Signature Program. His works are verified on Artsy, Singulart, and Saatchi Art, and are held in private collections in Switzerland, the United States, and Europe.
Pellarose is represented by Samhart Gallery, Switzerland, and is a selected artist of the Photolabs Athens Signature Program. His works are verified on Artsy, Singulart, and Saatchi Art, and are held in private collections in Switzerland, the United States, and Europe.
The deconstruction of appearances is at the heart of my artistic approach. Stealing and revealing.
Pellarose