Just finished writing this review of the work of Quebecois photographer Alain Paiement, the first really pleasant surprise of the 2004 exhibition season:

New Cartographies
By Christopher Brayshaw


Walter Benjamin, writing in the late Thirties on Karl Blossfeldt’s close-up studies of plant anatomy, famously remarked that Blossfeldt’s pictures had brought a new kind of aesthetic perception into being by presenting tangible evidence of a world that, while continuous with our own, had previously lingered just beyond human perception. In Benjamin’s opinion, one of the most powerful arguments in favor of photography’s precarious status as an independent art medium, and not merely a novel technology, was the ease with which it sharpened and focused aesthetic perception, training it on subjects that had never previously basked in its gaze.

Standing in Presentation House Gallery before Montreal artist Alain Paiement’s huge tiled architectural photographs, Walter Benjamin came immediately to mind and refused to depart. Paiement’s photographs are large – some are very large, eight or ten feet high and more than fifteen feet long – composite images of habited spaces – a bakery; the second-floor residences and offices above it; a squat; an urban apartment, and so on. Most of Paiement’s images are shot from above, looking down, as if a roof had been peeled back like the lid on a sardine can or blown away by a storm, so that you look down into the messy space beneath, as if from on high.

As Presentation House curator Bill Jeffries writes, “Paiement seems to say, ‘Let’s look closely at the world upon which we walk, sleep and eat, but not as the eye sees it, rather as an all-knowing mind might see it’; rather than looking up at the ceiling to see the gods, he gives us the view of the gods as they might peer down upon us.” Perspective is unfixed in Paiement’s pictures; the finished images are composites of many different exposures and conceal multiple vanishing points. Walls bend in and out a la a funhouse mirror, and objects appear and disappear in a complex dance of interlocking planes and textures. Looking at Paiement’s pictures is not like looking into a Renaissance perspective box, a shallow, illusionistic 3D space in which objects are variously dispersed, but is rather like gazing into a vortex that draws both eye and body in. The sense of falling down into a scene spread horizontally on a wall is a very strange one, and one that evoked, at least for me, a brief moment of nausea and fear. I felt myself rock, very gently, on my heels as I approached one of Paiement’s larger pictures, then those first disagreeable sensations slowly gave way to surprise and finally to elation as I oriented myself and began to navigate the picture.

Paiement’s images demand a specific kind of attention, a light scanning motion, similar to that of a diver moving above a seabed, or a pilot flying over a landscape. There is no horizon in the photographs to orient you, just an endless proliferation of details – a couple bathing together in a milk-white ceramic tub, an colored afghan flung over a chair, its contours skewed into a bright pinwheel of shapes -- the tattoo on a baker’s arm, a crowd running by in the street outside with flags, the circular staircase at the back of a building that looks as complex an ammonite’s spiral shell. You could spend hours, if you liked, counting the individual rolls in a bakery case or the dirty dishes in an apartment sink. This knowledge is dizzying at first – the implication that, if you wanted to, you could really hold all these things together in your head – then sobering, as you realize how long it would actually take and how much you would necessarily forget in the process. Paiement’s pictures invoke, then disclaim, any utopian claims to deity-level comprehension. This deadly serious philosophical task, and the humor and abundant technical skill Paiement brings to bear on it, reminds me of Georges Perec’s great novel Life: A User’s Manual, which anatomizes, room by room and floor by floor, each inhabitant of a Parisian apartment block, beginning with their physical surroundings and moving on to their personal histories, their inner lives, and their dreams. If I say that Paiement’s art stands comparison with Perec’s, I mean no hyperbole, but merely want to show how much the works on display at Presentation House Gallery surprised and moved me. It is rare these days to encounter artworks that are truly technically innovative, rarer still to encounter works in which technical and conceptual innovation float in such perfect, precarious equilibrium.

- posted by cjb @ 10:57 AM