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Paul-Émile RiouxRenaissance - between Sky and Sea2025
2025
$9,500
£7,224.33
€8,332.92
CA$13,307.76
A$14,894.01
CHF 7,777
MX$181,707.85
NOK 98,718.81
SEK 93,678.08
DKK 62,226.27
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About the Item
Archival photo print under museum acrylic.
Three prints, 3 x 24x24" (each)
Signed & Numbered by the artist
Edition of 5
Montreal-based artist and photographer Paul-Émile Rioux has been creating virtual worlds for many years that lie at the crossroads of abstraction and figuration. His works invite viewers to question their perceptions, oscillating between the reflection of a tangible reality and a purely imaginary construct.
Through a distinctive approach that combines advanced digital technologies with photographic expertise, Rioux explores the worlds he discovers and extracts striking images from them:
"The virtual digital spaces I explore allow me to propose a reflection on our perception of reality. We live in a world where representations of the real are often deceptive. By provoking both fascination and vertigo, perhaps I can spark a reflection on how we inhabit territories and manage the resources that shape our world."
Rioux’s creative process also relies on the deliberate orchestration of algorithmic anomalies within modeling software. These irregularities give rise to spaces that appear photographic but are entirely abstract. The artist never uses photography as the foundation for his creations.
"The spaces I create do not correspond to any specific vision," he explains. "They are virtual slices (or framings) of digitally transforming material.
I do not draw these places; I implement possibilities."
Digital creation allows him to explore notions of reality and fiction, questioning how memories are constructed and how we assign meaning to imagined visual constructs.
Through this singular approach, where aesthetic exploration meets critical analysis, Paul-Émile Rioux is recognized as one of the most innovative artists in digital creation, capable of maintaining a delicate balance between the fascination evoked by these virtual worlds and the profound questioning of our certainties in an ever-changing world.
RIOUX's Renaissance series invites us to attentive observation where the horizon becomes the theater of an encounter between the finite and infinite. Composed of 18 digital works, this collection follows the Turquoise Default series, marking a significant evolution in the artist's approach. These works, immersed in turquoise tones and delicate atmospheric gradients, transcend mere seascape representation to confront us with our perceptual limits. The horizon line, central to each composition, acts as a metaphysical threshold, a boundary between the visible and invisible, between what we can comprehend and what escapes our perception.
RIOUX masters the balance between abstraction and figuration. The aquatic surfaces, rendered with digital texture, oscillate between materiality and dissolution, while the skies, treated in luminous gradients, evoke endless depth. This visual ambiguity presents us with a fundamental choice: to accept pure abstraction or to seek concrete representation in these undefined spaces.
The strength of these works lies in their ability to transform uncertainty into creative potential. The variations of light, evanescent reflections on water, and atmospheric nuances create a meditative space where hope becomes tangible, not as certainty, but as an opening to infinite possibilities. "History and future are collective works in perpetual creation, where each gaze participates in the construction of meaning." This reflection by RIOUX finds its incarnation in each work of the series, where the dialogue between our finitude and surrounding immensity becomes palpable.
- Creator:Paul-Émile Rioux (1953, Canadian)
- Creation Year:2025
- Dimensions:Height: 24 in (60.96 cm)Width: 72 in (182.88 cm)Depth: 0.25 in (6.35 mm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Miami, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU13615739862
Paul-Émile Rioux
Paul-Émile Rioux creates evocative digital art that pulls the viewer into an uncanny world and provides a haunting reflection of reality. His virtual color photography and landscape photography pieces reveal their synthesized nature only upon close inspection.
Rioux is based in Montréal, Canada, where he studied animation at Concordia University. In the early 1990s, he established a career in photography with a focus on urban environments. At the same time, he was developing an interest in 3D software. Eventually, the virtual world overtook the real one as his main passion.
Rioux combines his photography with cutting-edge technology to create the virtual matrices from which his images are born. He eschews more popular image manipulation technologies, such as Photoshop, in favor of numerous digital techniques and 3D software. Each technology is like a different paintbrush that helps Rioux generate the final image, which is the result of algorithmic possibilities captured in a cut of virtual space and time.
Rioux’s new media work offers a tense glimpse of a dystopic world populated by infinite skyscrapers. It encourages one to pause and reflect on the future and the environment.
Whitehot Magazine advises the viewer to “think of one of Rioux’s works as the template for a truly engulfing experience.” Though the worlds he brings to life exist only digitally, they represent a meeting of reality and imagination.
Rioux’s work was exhibited at the 2021 Cube Art Fair in New York City.
On 1stDibs, find a collection of Paul-Émile Rioux’s digital art.
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By Paul-Émile Rioux
Located in Miami, FL
Archival photo print under acrylic glass.
Dimensions: 48 x 48 in.
Depth: 1/4 in.
Artist and photographer Paul-Émile Rioux lives in Montréal, Canada.
His lifelong interest in cutti...
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2010s Contemporary Color Photography
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Plexiglass, Archival Pigment
Renaissance - Revival 12
By Paul-Émile Rioux
Located in Miami, FL
Archival photo print under acrylic glass.
Dimensions: 48 x 48 in.
Depth: 1/4 in.
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2010s Contemporary Color Photography
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Transition_A2 - Elements Connection
By Paul-Émile Rioux
Located in Miami, FL
Archival photo print under museum acrylic.
Dimensions: 48 x 48 in.
Depth: 1/4 in.
Edition of 5
Montreal-based artist and photographer Paul-Émile Rioux has been creating virtual wor...
Category
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Archival Pigment
Renaissance - Revival 18
By Paul-Émile Rioux
Located in Miami, FL
Archival photo print under acrylic glass.
Dimensions: 48 x 48 in.
Depth: 1/4 in.
Artist and photographer Paul-Émile Rioux lives in Montréal, Canada.
His lifelong interest in cutting-edge media technology as well as his expertise in photography cast him as pioneer in digital art and allow him to develop virtual matrix from which he extracts his images.
In his works he explores a universe that lies at the crossroad of abstraction and the figurative, inviting the viewer to determine if what he sees is a reflection of reality or imagination.
Through is truly unique approach RIOUX is one of the most innovative artists in digital creations and one of the few creative minds able to blend with such keenness aesthetics research and critical distance.
Whether they translate into a Dantesque urbanity or the infinite horizon of a turquoise ocean, the urban territory reflected by his creations offers a dystopian view of the world, challenging our attitude towards the environment and the future.
From the onset, RIOUX has no intention of matching IRL expectations of what digital art 'should' look like, but strives to play with our notions of what's real, what's not, how we remember, and how we infer meaning into imaginary visual constructs.
---
RIOUX started the Renaissance project in 2016.
Renaissance further develops themes explored by RIOUX in his earlier series Turquoise Default. It is not merely a progression however, but also a contrast. This new series poses questions about hope, which is perhaps now more relevant than ever.
“Renaissance invokes in us a sense of uncertainty and a self-awareness of our limits, of an infinity made apparent by the horizon line, the vanishing point, the moment in any spatial or temporal projection beyond which we can no longer see, but from which, nonetheless, we know the universe carries on. At the same time it poses a choice to us: do we accept the openness of abstraction or do we insist on imposing a (false) certainty of representation in what we see in these images. Hope is a faith made possible by uncertainty and the unknown, by an understanding that history and the future are creative acts, works of art in which we all participate.” Neal Rockwell
There are 18 pieces in the RENAISSANCE collection.
Each archival pigment print is produced under the supervision of the artist.
The print is mounted under a single piece of 1/4"/ 6 mm gallery...
Category
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
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Renaissance - Revival 11
By Paul-Émile Rioux
Located in Miami, FL
Archival photo print under acrylic glass.
Dimensions: 48 x 48 in.
Depth: 1/4 in.
Artist and photographer Paul-Émile Rioux lives in Montréal, Canada.
His lifelong interest in cutti...
Category
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Archival Pigment
Renaissance - Revival 8
By Paul-Émile Rioux
Located in Miami, FL
Archival photo print under acrylic glass.
Dimensions: 48 x 48 in.
Depth: 1/4 in.
Artist and photographer Paul-Émile Rioux lives in Montréal, Canada.
His lifelong interest in cutti...
Category
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Archival Pigment
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