Alain Paiement  /  Surfacing Over There

As part of an exchange initiated by the Ministère des Relations internationales du Québec and the State of Maharashtra, Matthieu Foss Gallery (Mumbai) and the Darling Foundry (Montreal) offer an exhibition of the Canadian photographer Alain Paiement. Ten works, giving an overview of his practice, suggest a unique perspective on the teeming life of Montreal and some atypical personalities who inhabit it.

Paiement's work is distinguished by its reflection on the spatialization of photography and the construction of vision. He establishes close links between architecture, history and anthropology, while questioning our understanding of the world with tools and methods that can be associated with geography. Since the 1980s, the artist has developed original techniques and processes, based on the principle of mapping. Most of his works involve a systematic division of the photographed subject, followed by a reconstruction that challenges our perception.

The eye of the photographer invites us to dive in private worlds of everyday life - by revealing the intimacy of a character in his shower or the interior of an apartment oversaturated with information, and in more public worlds, inside a bakery and over a street section invaded by demonstrators. In some cases, the images result from a single shot (Showers series 1998-2004, Level 2001 or Joni 1996), while others are the result of a complex map made from hundreds of shots (Pane Mundial 2002, From Where Live 2002, Arrangements According To Nature 2009).

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Ministère des Relations Internationales du Gouvernement du Québec.

Alain Paiement

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.