Emile Bellet: In Yellow Dress
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Emile Bellet, a French painter who has gained fame and recognition across the Atlantic, possesses that "French touch" that Americans love so much: the ability of a classical painter to liberate himself from classicism with complete simplicity, without renouncing the foundations of the past.

The woman is, and remains, one of the favorite subjects of artists. From the ancestral mystery of the mother to the timeless fascination of the lover, here is the muse illuminating the world, as Dali so skillfully expressed and painted.
In Bellet's work, this fascination seems to be that of a fleeting moment, almost blurred, which is forever etched in memory. A silhouette outlined against a barely sketched background. A moment of life captured by the eye, a moment of desire delivered as a precious memory.

Emile Bellet: Leaning
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Emile Bellet: The Piano
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And suddenly the flaw appears, the anticipation that comes to light beyond the stolen moment. When the movement of tall grasses bending under a suggested breeze, when the flowers stretching towards a desired sun, contrast with the languid feminine silhouettes, waiting for an event (a man?), coming to meet them and animate them in turn.
Self-taught, Bellet knew how to take from what existed, choosing to love the simplicity of color blocks from De Staël, and the chromatic fury of the Fauves; choosing to be enamored with the late fifties, when Grace Kelly was Hitchcock's muse and the colors of the Mediterranean were captured on MGM's Technicolor films.

Thus, with his brushes and brooms, Emile Bellet tells us of a dreamed time when women, barely out of crinolines, waited, leaning against terrace railings with a sea view, for the prince, surely charming, who would come to free them from that moment where nothing happens, but where everything remains possible.
For this is what Bellet captures so well, and what has made him so famous: the depiction of a possible future...

© Texts & Photos: Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES

Emile Bellet: In a Field of Sunflowers
Original lithograph s/n