After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in visual arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1982, Alain Paiement undertook graduate studies in Europe. In 1987, he returned to Montreal to complete a master’s degree in visual arts at UQAM, where he has taught since 2004. The first Québec artist to be invited to show work at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1992, he has been known since the late 1980s for his sculptural, or “plastic” photographic work. Having had works in numerous international exhibitions, he is considered a mainstay of Canadian contemporary photography.
Artwork description
This diptych presents photographs of an amalgam of bubbles and foam produced inside a Plexiglas box, whose proportions match those of the walls on which the work is installed. The shots were realized inside the same pavilion, so that the surrounding environment are mirrored in the polychromies of the soapy spheres. The structure of the windows of the pavilion is therefore reflected and multiplied, creating optical-organical effects. Spheres bind together creating irregular polyhedra whose facets are all surfaces of an iridescent prism. The work is to be thought of in relation to Expansion, another photographic mural by the artist located at the Metro level of the same pavilion. These two works are in dialogue with the research in biological sciences that takes place in this pavilion, pointing at the same time to molecular microcosms and constellations.