Canadian photographer Alain Paiement brings geography back into the visual arts
Quebec-based photographer Alain Paiement's works are evidence that digital manipulation is not the devil but a tool that an artist can employ to achieve hitherto unscaled heights. And at a height Paiement indeed is. The artist's works stretch the claustrophobia of the everyday to an awesome Lego-land, a meticulous cutand-paste of composite imagery that recreates the jigsaw puzzle that comprises urban living. A bakery or an apartment are thus delineated with a cartographer's obsession, encompassing within a frame everything — the awning, the wall, the staircase, the room, the bath, the back door, the back staircase and, in the case of the bakery, garbage cans at the latter end of the spectrum complete a consumption cycle even.
At other moments you are privy to a corseted urbanity, of a more private kind. His use of characters in a shower or a bathtub is a good measure of how his craft can explode the imploded, how the claustrophobic can be magnified into a more kaleidoscopic voyeurism. The overhead perspective also allows the viewer to pick up individual codes that collectively form an image here; thus a soap, a shower, a slipper: all these become the visual equivalent of alphabets by which you cobble together a syntax.
Filmmakers have been historically fascinated by the overhead shot for its navigational prowess, from Hitchcock to Brian de Palma to Gaspar Noe. Noe's Enter the Void, set in the neon-tainted, drug-addicted underworld of Tokyo, has milked the format to experimental extremes, thus giving the film a psychedelic and emotional edge. Paiement's concept of urbanity is more vanilla in comparison, but he makes up for it by packing in the details.
Also, what could have been the victim of over-cleverness or gimmicky flourishes is in fact the culmination of remarkable rigour here. Hundreds of photographs have been composited, re-aligned, manipulated and collated to create a seamless illusion of Paiement's homemade geography. The artist has shown extensively in Japan, China, Europe and the States. This exhibition itself is collaboration between the government of Maharashtra and the ministry of international relations in Quebec, which is great news. Maps, after all, are meant to bring the world closer.
Quebec-based photographer Alain Paiement's works are evidence that digital manipulation is not the devil but a tool that an artist can employ to achieve hitherto unscaled heights. And at a height Paiement indeed is. The artist's works stretch the claustrophobia of the everyday to an awesome Lego-land, a meticulous cutand-paste of composite imagery that recreates the jigsaw puzzle that comprises urban living. A bakery or an apartment are thus delineated with a cartographer's obsession, encompassing within a frame everything — the awning, the wall, the staircase, the room, the bath, the back door, the back staircase and, in the case of the bakery, garbage cans at the latter end of the spectrum complete a consumption cycle even.
At other moments you are privy to a corseted urbanity, of a more private kind. His use of characters in a shower or a bathtub is a good measure of how his craft can explode the imploded, how the claustrophobic can be magnified into a more kaleidoscopic voyeurism. The overhead perspective also allows the viewer to pick up individual codes that collectively form an image here; thus a soap, a shower, a slipper: all these become the visual equivalent of alphabets by which you cobble together a syntax.
Filmmakers have been historically fascinated by the overhead shot for its navigational prowess, from Hitchcock to Brian de Palma to Gaspar Noe. Noe's Enter the Void, set in the neon-tainted, drug-addicted underworld of Tokyo, has milked the format to experimental extremes, thus giving the film a psychedelic and emotional edge. Paiement's concept of urbanity is more vanilla in comparison, but he makes up for it by packing in the details.
Also, what could have been the victim of over-cleverness or gimmicky flourishes is in fact the culmination of remarkable rigour here. Hundreds of photographs have been composited, re-aligned, manipulated and collated to create a seamless illusion of Paiement's homemade geography. The artist has shown extensively in Japan, China, Europe and the States. This exhibition itself is collaboration between the government of Maharashtra and the ministry of international relations in Quebec, which is great news. Maps, after all, are meant to bring the world closer.
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