BIOGRAPHY
Félix Morel is a Montréal based musician and collage artist born on June 4, 1976 at Lakeshore General Hospital in Pointe-Claire, Québec, Canada. At the age of 9 years old he won a fake gold medal at the Cascades Inc. Calendar Contest for his drawing depicting a skateboarder going down a hill. His collage work is a mix of technological, erotic and gory imagery, often in the form of imaginary album sleeves, paperback book covers or movie posters. Composed of precisely arranged magazine cuttings they picture colorful and surreal fantasies fueled by trance states and the meticulous act of cutting and layering images and symbols into a total whole artwork. Morel is self taught both in his musical and visual art practices.
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"A collagist works with history, remixing fragments that come by chance with fragments that come via heavy searching, a slog through printed matter that only sometimes yields satisfaction. A collagist can speak to today's idiosyncratic moment or seek to tap into a well-founded tradition. Félix Morel does both, paying homage to early love and creating new images for a new world.
The work is precise but does not negate the artists hand or the materiality used. The ripples of glossy magazine paper push against the surface of the framed work. Chosen icons lifted from Omni Magazine circa 1981 are girded with echoes of colored paper, emanating auric fields of sky blue or hot pink, rainbows sweating off robot ladies or jewelled serpents. Cosmic figures, totem animals and mythic beasts, chrome mechanisms, astral light and laser graphics, orb upon orb upon orb. These are the visions of pinball games saturated in retro visions of the future, what computer graphics looked like to the airbrush artists or the early 1980's.
This is not lo-fi twee collage, content to idly traipse through children's encyclopedias for an EZ nostalgic mash-up, nor is it the play of weathered paper textures, abstracted into fields engaging fields. This is de-rigueur psychedelic album cover art from some lost 1973, intent on engaging eyeballs for an extended length of time, jostling for new directions and new connections. Morel's work allows for instant glimpses that shock the retina into recognition.
And for those commited viewers, there is much to keep the eyes engaged after that initial entry point.
The visual work of Félix Morel owes a huge debt to music. Often the collages themselves use LP sleeves as supports., framed with the mysterious 33 remaining within but locked away from view or play. As a musician, he delights in long, trancelike streams of heavy psych.
His main musical project, PANOPTICON EYELIDS, released in 2012 an album bearing his cover art. Entitled "Overwhelming Visions", the music, much like his collage work, seeks to retune neural pathways, allowing for larger spectra of reality to enter the folds of our perceptions."
BILLY MAVREAS
Introduction to "OVERWHELMING VISIONS: THE COLLAGES OF FÉLIX MOREL" KOLAJ Magazine, Issue #1, January 2012.