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.
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RIOUX started the Cloud project in 2022.
Paul-Emile Rioux’s series Cloud, like his other work, is a kind of aesthetic thought experiment. Each square image is bisected symmetrically, or nearly symmetrically, by a tidy horizon. The upper half display forms that appear as clouds, the bottom as an underwater seascape, yet at the same time mimics the cloudlike formations of above.
Formally these works reference hard-edged abstraction, minimalism and abstract expressionism, though juxtaposed with a sort of Instagram lifestyle sensibility. When shown as a gridded series, they recall the Instagram account @insta_repeat which curates gridded typologies of nearly identical influencer photos – for instance sunsets on a beach, or campfires with hiking boot clad feet visible in the foreground, transforming images, which individually are meant to signify the good life, into symbols of stifling homogeneity, cynically trying to capitalize on mass-produced sensations.
Unlike past movements in abstract or minimal art, however, Rioux is not striving to create self-contained objects, but windows into deeper currents that churn in the dark spaces where culture, technology and the subconscious flow together. Rioux’s digital works are not specifically images, but notes, ways of thinking. They connect to a larger discourse.
With Clouds, Rioux thinks aloud about what is hidden and what is revealed in our relationships to technology and nature. It is a meditation on “the cloud,” which, like real clouds, seem immaterial, but in fact are physical and have a material impact on the world. Rioux considers the juxtaposition between weight and weightlessness – the apparent weightlessness of virtual reality, against the mass, the inescapability of the material world. Technology promises a world of lightness, connectivity and the bounty of limitless growth, or if it cannot quite muster that illusion, at least the offer of escape into a simulated universe of carnivalesque distraction shepherding us away from the environmental catastrophe our economic system inflicts on the earth. In this series Rioux asks us to reflect on what the clouds hide.
There are 18 pieces in the Cloud 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 museum acrylic...
Category
2010s Contemporary Washington - Art
MaterialsArchival Pigment, Plexiglass
