Come on in, through the door in the ceiling
Award finalist Alain Paiement invites viewers to explore human spaces from above
Amap is a magnet for one’s eyes – the urge to situate oneself in the world is almost irresistible. Turn a Google street map into an aerial view of buildings, yards and laneways and you’re glued to the computer screen.
To say Alain Paiement has been tapping into this voyeuristic instinct might explain why his overhead views of apartments and other human spaces are so irresistible, but Paiement comes reluctantly to “spectacle.”
Paiement is one of three finalists for the Scotiabank Photography Award that will be announced at the CONTACT photography festival in Toronto on May 9. He is a mapper of the physical world, or as Hugues Charbonneau, co-director of Galerie Division, sees it, “an historian of materials.”
Paiement photographs the interior of buildings in multiple perspectives from the ceiling, revealing the contents of the walls and floors of each room. It’s as if the roof has been removed to get this overhead perspective.
People will spend 15 minutes inspecting the details of a Paiement photograph, Charbonneau said. Galerie Division is showing one of them as part of an exhibition and has another hanging in a side room.
At the CONTACT festival last year, a curator asked Paiement to make nearly life-size overhead views of apartments in a material that people could walk on.
“At first I resisted: ‘I’m not doing spectacles,’ ” he said. “Then, I realized, ‘Yes, I am doing spectacles.’ ”
Paiement’s bird’s-eye view of an apartment became a popular site for people to take pictures of their friends lying on the image of a bed.
Anne-marie Ninacs, who curated the Mois de la Photo in 2011, nominated Paiement for the Scotiabank award, which is worth $50,000 in cash, plus a solo exhibition at next year’s festival and a book published by Steidl, a German publisher of art photography.
The other finalists are Fred Herzog of Vancouver and Arnaud Maggs of Toronto. Herzog and Maggs are in their 80s; Paiement is 52.
Unless the award is meant to honour a life’s work, I like Paiement’s chances. His work is both accessible and documentary, like Herzog’s, and intellectually rigorous, like Maggs’s, and more intriguing than either’s.
Paiement started as an abstract painter, exploring surfaces and layers, pouring paint onto canvases lying on the floor. What he made was an “organized mess,” he said in an interview, but also resembled a view of Earth from above.
When you look at a geographical image, you always relate to the viewpoint, he added.
The viewpoint is key to Paiement’s work. In Brussels, where he lived for several years, he photographed the facades of buildings on narrow streets, starting from the roof of the building opposite, then descending floor by floor to keep a straight-on perspective. He then went inside the building so he could “photograph both sides of the facade” for what he calls his architectural still lifes.
In 1996, he started making the overhead views. Pane Mundial (2002) was made over a day in the life of a bakery, starting the night before as the bakers rolled dough and fed the ovens. The front of the bakery shows stacks of bread and an open cash drawer. Outside, you see a truck with its load of bread, and, serendipitously, passersby celebrating Brazil’s World Cup victory.
Paiement compares his approach to that of the Northern Europe masters who painted a woman on a horse as a material reality. It’s a woman on a horse, not an allegory of freedom that a Southern European might make of the subject.
“I just record what’s there,” he said. “I don’t have to express anything; the work will find its own expression.”
One thing leads to another in Paiement’s fertile mind. Exploded Views (2011) is an “exploded view of an explosion” of a television set.
He has gone into videos of bubbles, jellyfish and flowing ice. And he’s “breaking up the narration with video that addresses duration.” Dérive, 9 Minutes (2012) is made from a video of drifting ice on the St. Lawrence River. The video is transformed into acontinuous image divided into 12 strips.
A current project to be integrated in the new research centre of the CHUM (Centre Hospitalier de l’université de Montréal) involves an 80-foot mural based on gene sequencing that seamlessly morphs from details of African textiles to snowflakes.
Paiement described a recent visit to his Rosemont studio by an international curator.
“I should have shown a few specific projects,” he said. Instead, he showed the curator everything he was working on.
“It seemed like all I did was show myself going in opposite directions.”
He told Ninacs the visit had left him depressed. “But you’ve always worked this way,” he said she told him. More i mages of Paiement’s photographs can be found at l eokamengallery. com. For information on CONTACT, go to scotiabank contactphoto.com. For information on the photography award, go to scotiabank photoaward.com. Photographie, which includes work by Paiement, Isabelle Hayeur, Gwenaël Bélanger, Manon De Pauw and Michel De Broin, continues to May 5 at Galerie Division, 2020 William St. Information: galeriedivision.com.
Five Montrealers are among 25 artists under the age of 40 from across Canada on the long list for the 2012 Sobey Art Award, which is worth $50,000 to the winner.
Olivia boudreau, rap haëlle de Groot, Julie Favreau, Nadia Myre and Ève K. Tremblay are the nominees. A shortlist of five artists will be announced in late June, with the winner announced on Nov. 16.