The press and art critics

Bellor is a true artist in the full sense of the word. His well thought out work, carefully executed is affirmed by an exceedingly rare drawing talent.

A painting quietly and carefully executed and still full of vibration, an art secretely prepared like an alchimist looked after important works.

A refined technique with remarkable visionary qualities. With the meticulosity of the details this painter-artist, who studied architecture, would like to show his admiration for the great classicists: with the strength of his fantasies he escapes to enlightened symbolisms of which the beauty conquers.

His paintings ? A great inner peace combined with an amazing powerful colour range and mastered by a remarkable drawing talent. Does this work go the opposite direction?

His mastership allows him to join the limited group of Master.

This artist has added his name to the list of the most important surrealists of this century.

The press unanimously recognized him as a true artist who joins straight away the line of the Great Masters. We do not visit an exhibition of Bellor but we participate. Maybe there lies the genius of this extraordinary painter

That honors this extraordinary painter, real genius of his time.

This painter whose fine brush strokes and colour effects has enraptured all critics.

The artist shows off as a confused and uneasy contemplator. The “woman” is here a “mechanism”, most certainly precious, but part of a great magical play as the baroque universe in which she opens up.

What does Bellor really miss to be next to the Greatests ? We dare say it : not one single hair but just that little thing to snatch at the opportunity.What else do you require to understand?

Today he could be a magician and taking care at the same time of his personage and his secrets.
Therefore, a strange complicity will be made between this one (the spectator) and the maker of illusions, not without a warning and luckily not without delight. This art is absolutely not safe.

His rigorous construction is that of an architect and therefore depending upon the buyers and other numerous keys of accordance.

This artist paints with a slow progress and an accurary of a perfectionist. But this meticulosity in the creation and the reservedness in the production is only associated with the desire of renewal, each work distinguishes itself by a proper idea and concept.

Each painting is a musical inspiration. An inspiration which clarifies, refusing a wild lyricism, weaving a fragile balance, inner vibration where the subjects are never on the same line. They never seal in a cramped vision of their function.

He made his way in a “different” painting by creating a “calculated” universe, very different from the one of Magritte, in a much sought asceticism of restriction to a few subjects and with an accuracy absolutely perfectionist concerning the profession and the materials, not applied by the master of Lessines.

His career is marked by masterly works, which impress on the memory and cause admiration.

Was he an architect in Rome, Paris, London, Flrence or a healer like Cagliostro or a magician from Venice or a charachter in a Fellini film still to be made? We are looking at the man and his work, tempted to work out the plot and we are dreaming of the knight of Saint-Germain. Let us accept all those things and concentrate now on the work of this magician, who started to paint, who is jealously keeping all of his secrets, niggling his paintings and displaying a perfectionsim close to exigency not free of austerity.

All the expressiveness of this art, where sometimes an icy irony can be discerned, generates from the rather original appearance of the Mephistophelian figures, pleated in red, light like flames, elegant like dancers, who introduce us a mystery of another dimension. These paintings belong to the category of Masters and are marked with a sign that could be the signature of the “Bright one”. Because he appears more with discretion than with a lot of fuss.
It seems that Bellor with his innocent carriage of secret agent, his diplomatic politeness, his blue eyes too pure, his interrogative white eyebrow must have started, in a certain way, by himself

A mysterious artist but who present a work extraordinary controlled, absolutely finished. The man who is hiding behind a pseudonym with some alchemistian sound, is very discrete and refuses any loud triumph. This is no timidity but a necessity to get out of everyday life in order to increase his energy and his creative force. He is all alone to control his creative force and to obtain of this inner domination a pictorial quality which tends to perfection...

Also mannerist resurgence, which recall the Great Masters of the North, Boeckland, Goetzius: the fragility in love with the balance of Bellor’s personages gets over the barrier which separates the hereafter with a theatrical magic which proceeds at one and the same time of the ritual and the dance. The part of the sacred is intense, expressed in the burny drapery and spread the mysteries among the discrete transparencies: finally becomes enlightened in the love for the bodies by the amber-coloured carnations where the glazes are like caresses. Cult of the woman with hieratic forms, who seems to get out of the millenarian temples.

The paint is somptuous, the glazes show the slightest effect of veil of muslin and when the choice of lunar coulours is determined, a symphony of tints of the rise before dawn appears, the first light before the sun shines.

Bellor is a distinguished, mysterious, enigmatic man like his works. It is also an unequalled profession with a breath-taking drawing talent.

He learned from the surrealism the fantastic and the freedom of imagination. But he is adding an absolutely perfect technique: the drawing is rigorous, an Ingres line. The work with glazes makes the transparencies impalpable, the imperfections of the skin opalescent, the red colours infernal and the moving of the fabrics feels like to be touched. His work reminds us without any doubt the Primitives of the North. Finally, the mixing of the phantasmagoria and the rigorous technique results in a rare and intense emotion.

A virtuoso in all techniques, he left us a lot of drawings completely filled which we could consider as daily exercices. Pencil, charcoal, inkt, gouaches and pastels prevail. The monotype is rare as well as the red chalk sketches.

The watercolours cap everything by intensity and genuineness with subjects raised from the stroke of the brush.

Even though the artist has an unfailing technique and could, with great confidence, proceed to oil paintings, he must still get over two important and decisive stages : control of the colour and expressing the ideas at the back of his mind. For doing so, he disposes of two progressively acquired characteristics : his profound knowledge of classic paintings and especially the painting of the Italian Renaissance and his humanistic vision. He admires the subtle richness of the colours of the great masters, he applies the technique of the glazes with exceptional mastery.

A work of a great chromatic concentration and mystery which, the more it is revealed, awaken in us by contemplation.

Strange and exceptional artist with a name of an extra-terrestrial or of a high-priest from the antique and mysterious Egypt. Fascinating artist with a perfect technique, claiming the inheritiance of the great pioneers who were the Flemish Primitives, fascinating by his strange variations of a subject deliberately and solidly elaborated, refusing the interference of the hazard, but not the one of the imaginary. Perhaps the beauty of the Devil, asks Stéphane Rey.

But are we inclining to abandon ourselves to his glowing fire.

The Belgian painter was simultaneously a magician of colours and a lover of women, omnipresent in his paintings and his dreams. Sensitive and intellectual artist, Bellor bears the inheritance of the Flemish Primitives but also tendencies and ancestral civilizations, that is why he gives us a rich and beautiful art.

On looking at his paintings and drawings we can easily deduct that his is a virtuoso, an aesthete, a juggler of symbols, an admirer of the old masters and the figure of a woman, this is ideal for those who like strangeness and symbols. Twenty years before his death he secluded from society to devote himself entirely to his work. This exhibition is paying a tribute to the artist, who unfairly has been forgotten, of which the substance and the form of his paintings mark him as a master!

The work of Belor with a secret magic is also a sulphuruous trap very hard to stand away from. His creative power is so strong that it is very difficult to say who has the most talent, the drawer, the colourist or the poet...

Three works at the biennial of Florence/Italy

Women were his world and when men haunted his painting, they were magicians, artists of the unexpected. His world often tinted with somptuous red colours, showed a well defined preference for draperies and for little erudite things distorting the logic. It’s true, the man was out of the ordinary.

With his usual elegance and within the strictest secrecy Bellor left this magic world at the beginning of 2000, marking his presence in the century. Incontestable spreader of miracles he has been the marvellous face of a period where there was no time do dream.

Born in 1911, in love with beauty, he lived in a century where unfortunately for him violence and vulgarity was worth more than refinement and elegance. Talented painter, drawer and pastellist, he had colleagues who had much more gift for success and scandal. All this confirmed his choices.

When an Art lover speaks of the artists he loves, he expresses more than conviction… he expresses warmth.  That communicative warmth is for us the key that opens the door to an unknown universe:  that of Bellor.

Whence the – subjective -- promenade in the work of an artist where in the end it does not really matter whether we have to label him a “surrealist” or a “fantasy realist”.

The first impression from Bellor’s paintings is the ambiguous strangeness, as if time were suspended and space infinite. A calm that fascinates and disturbs at the same time. Paintings that raise questions.

“The illusionist” invites us to follow him. He plays with the sun, wide-eyed… his approach is that of an automaton… enchanted by the sparkling star, it goes towards him, as if towards a god of light! 

Then with the eyelids still closed, in the red-orange palpebral glimmer that no painter had ever rendered so well, we see him, the Enchanter, like an unreal breath that pervades the painting: he is scarcely detached from the background, his fine feet on  tiptoe  retracing the way; with a theatrical gesture, raising his cape, red and volatile like a flame, he brings out a face… And the nail! The nail?  That small, spicy detail under the signature on the right!  The nail of this magical world, isn’t it the artist himself, here in a sort of profile self-portrait drawn at the age of 15, found again? “And his will and testament at the same time: devote himself to his art, body and soul, close the eyes, look inside, see the surreal unconscious gush, his endless dreams, his enchanting spells….

Fine art!”

Behind this pseudonym with its alchemist rhythm, Bellor (1911-2000) was a secretive and discrete being. Involuntarily, he managed to extract himself from daily life to devote himself to his art and to make one with it. Because he had the talent of his contemporaries (Magritte, Delvaux and the others) with whom he is often compared for that matter, but did not share their excessive ambition. With timeless perfectionism, he explored the traditional techniques, caressing the canvases with his successive glazings. A slow and rigorous method which left no room for precipitation nor for nervousness. That is precisely his great specific feature. Immensely attached to the quality of the end result, the artist went from ink pen to gouache, to oil with incredible ease. The result? A parallel world, haunted by unusual if not disturbing specimens, what are observed in the most unexpected situations. A rare, extraordinarily mastered and composed production, which defies classification.