Emmanuelle Pellet - La maîtresse

Emmanuelle Pellet - The Mistress
Acrylic painting on cardboard
H: 29.5 cm W: 20.5 cm
Unique piece, hand-painted, signed and numbered
The work was published in a youth album, La fille, by Jean de La Fontaine, which will be included with the shipment of the artwork.

About the work:

In a semicircular niche painted in trompe-l’œil, like a retable or a small painting by a 17th-century Dutch master, unfolds a composition that is decidedly contemporary, falling within the pop surrealist (lowbrow art) current. A dog’s head — a light-colored Labrador with drooping jowls and a piercing blue gaze — dominates the scene, carried by a half-human body dressed in a blouse adorned with a bone motif. Its arms, with meticulously detailed human hands (polished nails), lovingly embrace a second figure: a woman’s face with brown curls, wearing black sunglasses, with an expression that is both naive and enigmatic.

A red heart and three stylized peacock feathers, traced in fine yellow-green arabesques, punctuate the right side of the painting and bring a graphic and symbolic note — vanity, protection, multiple gaze — contrasting with the dark background and the sober architectural frame.

The work plays on the hybridization of man and animal and on scale confrontation, a device dear to lowbrow art and its tutelary figures (Mark Ryden, Marion Peck). The retable device, usually reserved for religious iconography, is here repurposed to sacralize a domestic and tender scene: the canine figure becomes a guardian, almost maternal, of her mistress whom she protects. The meticulous rendering of skin tones, textures (fur, fabric, feathers) testifies to a classical technical mastery used in service of a dreamlike and offbeat imagination.

A strong piece for a collection oriented toward narrative art and contemporary surrealism, this work will appeal with its graphic singularity, symbolic richness, and very refined technique. An ideal exhibition format, it asserts itself as a characterful piece, conducive to sparking conversation in a gallery as well as in private interiors.

About the artist:

Historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne, before being admitted to the Agrégation of plastic arts (3rd place). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of educational outreach.
Her career now nourishes a personal body of work where mastery of painting dialogues with a deep knowledge of image, art history, and the history of art. Her creations have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore and Mauritius, and have been the subject of numerous publications. They are now held in private collections in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Indian Ocean.
Through each of her works, Emmanuelle Pellet seeks to create an intimate encounter with the spectator: an emotion that endures long after the first glance.