Paul-Émile Rioux

Cells in Bright Pastels_6, 1/ 100 ed.

2018

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.