Alain Paiement

Alain Paiement's artistic practice has evolved between painting, installation, photography and video, with an ongoing interest in geography and cartographic processes. For almost thirty-five years, he has been translating his research into images that the possibilities of deploying this medium through space and time. Most of his projects deal with the relationship between ordered structures and chaotic phenomena, at various scales, between the satellite point of view and that of the macro-photographer. His works open up a rich space for reflection on the instantaneity that characterizes the current cultural regime or on the presentism that perhaps marks the relationship to the past and the future of contemporary society.

 

Biography

Alain Paiement lives in Montréal. He is an artist and professor at Université du Québec à Montréal. His research has led him to work in several visual art forms, between painting, photography, sculpture and architectural installation, with methods inspired by the geographical sciences. His works have been regularly shown in several countries since the early 1980s. Among which, the exhibitions Amphithéâtres, at the Power Plant in Toronto in 1989, The Power of the City / the City of Power,  at the Whitney Museum Downtown, New-York in 1992,  Mappemondes, at the Musée d’art Moderne de Liège in 1999 and Surfacing, at Tinglado 2, Tarragona (Spain) in 2004. More recently, the exhibitions Alice in Wonderland at Turku in Finland and at Cadiz in Spain in 2011 and in2012, Lost in landscape at Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Trento (Italy) in 2015 and There all is order and beauty at Argos,Centre for art and media, in Brussels, in 2019.  He received the prix Louis-Comtois in 2002 and was a Scotia Bank Photography Award finalist in 2012. He has created several works in public buildings and spaces in Montréal, such as Tessellations sans fin at Centre de recherche du CHUM in 2013 and Bleu de bleu, an installation on highway 20 in 2017.

Recent exhibitions

2019	Bleu-de-bleu, solo show, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, CA There all is order and beauty, Argos Center for art and media, Bruxelles, BE
2017	Le Temps file : Portrait de la vanité dans la collection du MNBAQ, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec, CA