Born in Montreal in 1960; lives and works in Montreal.

Alain Paiement’s photographic output associates painterly concerns with digital technology. In his works, architecture and space are reconstructed, not to say disturbed. Investigating our relationship to the world, Paiement surveys spaces quasi-cartographically, reconstructing them with tools and methods that might belong to a geographer. The artist’s recent photographs are mounted so that overhead views of familiar objects from public and domestic spaces are displayed in a frontal plane: façades or interiors are transformed into huge photograph-paintings simultaneously displaying the (fictitious) core of the building and its external environment. With the work shown here, the artist ingeniously flattens perspectives
and sets detailed views of the contents of four distinct locations into a painstaking
collage. The resulting distortions, improbable meeting points, variations of scale and point of view, and numerous ruptured spaces position us at a distance from, and in proximity to, the reality and the fiction represented.

Alain Paiement’s works have been shown extensively in North America and Europe,
including the Madrid International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO’05 and ’04) and the
exhibition The Space of Making, organized by VOX and presented in Germany in 2005. He has had solo shows at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2004), Tinglado 2, Tarragone, Spain (2004), the Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2004), the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (2003) and Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal (2002). His works are part of several public collections. Alain Paiement teaches at École des arts visuels et médiatique, Université du Québec à Montréal.