Alain
Paiement’s photographs of synoptic views of mundane architectural
spaces, such as apartments, a bakery and a ‘squat’
are presented here in a form that has not been used in previous
exhibitions of these works. The spatial layering of Paiement’s
work that has been seen, for instance, in the exhibition at
Galerie UQAM curated by Anne-Marie Ninacs in 2002, allowed viewers
to see the floors of the bakery building tipped on their sides,
as they are here, but arranged so that viewers would walk through
the gallery space to experience the reconstituted volume of
the layers of the building. Here, in our west gallery, you see
an ‘exploded view’ in which the same architectural
volume is flattened against the gallery walls, not unlike a
map. One is able to scan these works, moving vertically from
floor to floor, from the basement to the skylight in the roof
of the building, by panning 360°.
In Paiement’s photographs, the conventional view seen
by tourists and worshippers gazing up toward the ceiling paintings
of Michelangelo or Tiepolo is inverted. Instead of the mythic
heavens, Paiement shows us a downward view, looking at the floor
from the ceiling. Paiement’s deconstruction of space while
making the individual photographs that constitute one of his
images, is followed by a reconstruction of the space into a
single‘ aerial’ scan. The almost seamless transition
from room to room as one’s eye roves over his habitations
is not unlike the ‘magic’ of the set on a sit-com
– Paiement’s camera sees ‘through’ the
walls, but viewed vertically rather than horizontally. The idea
of making a photograph of a living space as if its roof had
been blown away in a hurricane is, in its form, a kind of architectural
modification, not unlike photographs of Gordon Matta-Clark’s
architectural interventions. In Paiement’s work, however,
the result of an illusory ‘cut’ is seen, but not
the ‘cut’ itself.
The strategy of working to a set of self-imposed constraints,
as Paiement does, has long been one key pillar of the working
methods of the writers belonging to the OULIPO Group. The OULIPO
is based largely in France and Belgium, where Paiement lived
off and on in the 1980s and the 1990s. The OULIPO began with
the idea of generating texts that had been subjected to severe
constraints, such as using all the other vowels except ‘e’.
In Paiement’s photographs he has limited his options by
proposing to photograph a world in its entirety as viewed parallel
to the force of gravity. Just as aerial photography has no real
choice but to look down, 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.
Bill
Jeffries
This
exhibition has been made possible by generous loans of works
from the artist, the Musée d’art contemporain de
Montréal, and the Musée national des beaux-arts
du Québec. Special thanks also to the artist, Anne-Marie
Ninacs, and to Louise Déry & her staff at the Galerie
de l'UQAM, Montreal, Quebec.
