Alain Paiement

Since the early 1980s, through painting, installation, photography, and sculpture, Alain Paiement has addressed the broad question of how we represent the world we live in. Very early on, Paiement used tracing and gridding processes borrowed from the science of cartography and topographic surveying in a systematic succession of markers and shots. The resulting images of public spaces are literally subjected to new volumetrics—spheres, half-spheres, spirals, etc.—that subvert the flatness of the photographic image by recreating a new spatial matrix that can accommodate the two-dimensional reproduction of three-dimensional realities.