description

Since the early 1980s, Alain Paiement has been incorporating the representation of constructed space and the architecture of the image into his art practice. His work Parages [Vicinity] followed in the wake of his mappings, which dealt with spatial topography and the transposition of the world we live in onto maps. With Parages [Vicinity], the artist trained a camera on his daily environment, keeping his instrument perfectly parallel to the ground as if it were descending from the sky. The result was a wholly novel vision of the places where he was living and working. The reconstructed images displayed a veritable swarm of activity, with multiple perspectives, distinct time frames and people living parallel lives that did, at times, intersect and overlap. The work managed, therefore, to represent the fascinating experience of the real world we see from where we are, at the same time as it revealed the existence of a world in progress, in other words, the one that unfolds beyond the spot where we happen to be.

The individual titles of the digital prints are as follows: Puits [Well]; Partir d’où j’habite [Starting from Where I live]; Pane mundial and Cave/Iris [Basement/Iris].