Alain Paiement

REFAIRE SURFACE
05.10–06.17.2001
Gallery

This photographer returns to Montreal as a solo artist after a seven-year absence. Paiement offers us a bird’s-eye view of the world in a new series that highlights the precarious and the human.

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At first glance, it’s as simple as geography: you photographically survey the territory from the top of an airplane or a satellite based on a minimal cartographic division, ensuring that the film plane is always positioned parallel to the surface being photographed. Here, the expanse observed is more immediate. I took pictures of the ground where I walked. The shots are methodical, but along the way, I wavered between documentary rigor and irrational emotion when faced with a few photogenic subjects. They were simply there where I happened to be at that moment on my journey. Without seeking them out. That’s what these images of an apartment, a car, a child, or a trapped mouse have in common. Snippets of journeys. No famous or monumental places. Just the precarious, in short.

Resurfacing is like revisiting the primitive geography that led me to drift from painting toward architectural photography for a few years. Recreating paintings. A few other unfinished mappings combining order and disorder, brought together under a title that implies a return from below, like a submarine surfacing after approaching via periscope. But here we see from above. It is no one’s gaze, except perhaps God’s.

We are observers without actually being there yet. A few meters away, just before landing.

A. P.