by James D. CampbellThe semioTiC palimpsesTs of paul-Émile Rioux

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Landcuts

In his remarkable Landcuts images (comprising the related City, Downtown and Suburbs sequences), Paul-Émile Rioux is creating a brave new metamor-phic world of habitat and inhabitation for the 21st Century. Indeed, Rioux broaches a powerful critique even as he builds future worlds of tiered signs that may seem exhilara tingly utopian and exhilarating on first viewing but which may in fact be profoundly dystopian. The recent works seem to have been cut whole cloth from his own forebrain. I mean, conjured from direct neural input. They are remarkably holistic: seamless and layered wholes into which we project with alacrity. They have a sweepingly alien cast that reminds us of the best speculative fiction about the cities of the future. They also cross borders of genre, blur distinctions between nature and architectonic and effortlessly subvert from within.

Upon first seeing them, I must confess that I thought quite involuntarily of Yves Tanguy’s masterwork Multiplication of the Arcs (1956) although there are no stylistic similarities whatsoever. [1] However, it is true that the work of both artists speaks to the limitless plasticity of the human mind. In any case, Rioux’s work belongs as much to painting as it does to film and photography. In any case, his works certainly highlight and work from, if not Surrealism, the itera-tion of simplicity upon which all modern computing is based. The monolithic integers that populate these works - geometric structures not unlike skyscrapers and simply vast in number - emulate the computation-al power of electrified binary numerics. In so doing, they reach an nth degree of formal comple xity. These are integers of infinity that possess a strange gran-deur and yield an epic rush. What we are given seems upon first inspection but a fragment of an endlessly ite rated formal whole, a planet-sized city of machine constructs wherein the embodied viewer may well im-agine a human factor not actually given. But what we do see is a well-nigh seamless urban core that, even with its slippages and divisions and thematized gaps, reaches outwards towards the unknown and, per-haps, the unknowable. Here is an environing world wherein nanobots seem to have run wild and the die is still being cast. It is one that tests existing definitions of place, space and emplacement.

Rioux proceeds with no avowed vision of the final out-come of these works. He has spoken of the powerful epiphany he experiences when he has reached what seems the salutary moment of completion (which is, however, entirely anticipatory of the next work) and is gratified by that jolt; one, not incidentally, that is visce rally felt by the viewer, as well.

The ‘building blocks’ inside these serial cities replicate until a certain threshold of density has been reached. At that point, a tuning-fork-like vibrancy builds in the restless core of a work and spreads outwards as aura. I say ‘restless’ because the core itself seems to be digitally morphing into myriad equivalences and disparities even as we view the artwork as an unfet-tered whole. Rioux seems to be accepting of chaotic and ceaselessly self-organizing systems (the city as a mutating template, the machine-body as a hybrid form, the emergence of a centreless and endlessly nodal and mutable information network, and even the once-and-future ideal of the multicultural society) that become potent telematic meshworks – replete grids that effortlessly penetrate and enmesh the consciousness of the viewer like wetware itself. That is, he spins a web of heterogeneous components com-bining to make unpredictable yet viable formal wholes in a progressive state of formal evolution. They pull us in – and we are captured there in a state of star-tled wonder. And yet, Rioux offers us not harmless fantasies – I mean, castles in the air, the archaic prod-ucts of cul-de-sac modernist idealism -- but an order of complexity that is bracing, bewildering, endlessly fascinating at the levels of both macrostructure and microstructure. Here and now are the cities of a fu-ture tense even now nipping at our heels – a palpable locus of Supermodernity within whose parentheses we are caught up in and subjected to the vortices that guide our flight and make imaginative engagement possible.

As Rioux points out, “cut,” is a word that possess-es replete significations, with the cinematic fore-most amongst them. Rioux has no interest what-soever in collage, unlike many of his confreres, and his manipulations seem to allow for organic, vertical growth and depth.

Landcuts The Semiotic Palimpsests of Paul-Emile Rioux

by James D. Campbell

Landcuts

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These cities are obviously mutable and distributable. The interplay of integers in these Landcuts calls to mind Mark Taylor’s seminal notion of “combinatorial play”. Taylor suggests that networks adhere to organizational schemata radically distinct from the rationalized grids and hierarchies that enjoyed virtual hegemony from the Enlightenment through Modernism. (2) He says: “The network is both substantive and emerging, a structure and a paradigm. Networking displaces the grid. Topology is destiny.” (3). This is strikingly true of Rioux’s work in which self-replicating and interconnective urban systems, mimesis and geometry are unifying tropes.

Attending to the increasingly interlocking nature of our telematic networks, Taylor ar-gues that the interactive conception lends primacy to an interaction that obviates the subject and object dichotomy, effectively making it “impossible to be sure where the human ends and the machine begins.” (4) There is a sense in which Rioux’s iconic monoliths are anthropomorphic and com-prise a matrix that stakes a lasting claim upon us. Taylor insists that informational networks are themselves “neither sub-jective nor objective” but rather consti-tute “the matrix in which all subjects and objects are formed, deformed, and re-formed” (5).

Here, the editing of film is more apropos where a cut is a specific piece of film that corresponds to a single shot. The “final cut” is the final edit of the whole film. His are truly director’s landcuts.

But the Landcuts easily transcend cinematic meaning and explore semiotic territory through the logic of digitality. They are genetic things. No stasis here and no discer nible missteps, either. His cities are rife with untold communities of signs and portents, aura and vectorial alumni. These are cities splintering and prolifera ting at their very cores, much like language itself, where the core is never actually seen, but more precisely its radial edges and continuing tumult can be in-ferred everywhere.

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He argued that it is no longer easy to distinguish the line of demarcation between mind and matter, self and other, human and machine. He argues that mind is dis-tributed throughout the world (6). Each landcut is like a set of informational currents that circulate “through us” and that “bind self and [digitally-generated] world in increasingly complex relations” (7). If Taylor is right, and

“the networks extruding from and into our bodies and minds form something like a technological unconscious, which, like conscious mental processes, screens informa-tion”, this has implications for the processing of these images, as well. (8).

In order to understand these ‘landcuts’ as networks of interchangeable semiotic intelligences is to suggest that, beneath their seductively interwoven and staggered facades (and the wealth of formal invention that they demonstrate), the artist is thinking in strikingly contem-porary and advanced ways about his project; namely, in a polycentric mode. Understood as acute models of combinatorial play, Rioux’s imaginary cities are the fur-thest things from hermetically closed representations or abstracts.

Their contents build momentum as we try and codify iconographies forever in flux and replete with a host of analogical and relational possibilities that slow our optic down and draw it out over and through repeated view-ings before any conclusions can be drawn as to what constitutes the nature of the image as a ’landcut” with the emphasis now on verb rather than noun.

Rioux’s images are exemplars of combinatorial play and employ sundry devices from 3D models of topogra-phy and other sources found on the vast archive of the Internet. Indeed, the “cut” in “landcut” is a piece of land that the ar tist frames, constructs, and grows by blending other cuts taken from landscape photography, product shots, those 3D models of topography, all reinterpreted through digital techniques and upon which he has superimposed his own overwhelmingly supple surfaces. Here is an urgent geomania of the inner city understood as a legion of signifiers, not as a singularity. His synthetic landscapes are profoundly multiple and destabilizing.

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LandCuts: from “TheSuburb” collection, 40” X 200” , pigment print on archival paper.

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As Rioux says: “Through my work as a photographer, I became fascinated by contemporary urban environ-ments and I started to explore the links between con-sumer culture, politics and technology.” [9] Through working exhaustively with those cuts, he is able to mix and match the fictive and actual, order and randomness, icon and anthropomorph, in order to take the viewer to places he has never been before, both inward (spiritual) and outward (alien), that ostensibly and simultaneously co-exist in both real and virtual worlds. And it seems that Rioux harnesses new digital technologies in such a way as to guarantee the restoration of aura and abet vi-sionary interaction while transcending a cinema that has largely lost its claim to vivid aura and violent dynamism. As Kristen Daly says:

“Cinema, as we have known it, is disintegrating, no longer functioning as a tool of national consolidation, common culture or ritual activity as it did in the past. Digital and computer technology create a cultural, social and economic logic system characterized by variability, manipulability,dispersion, excess and hybridity.” [10]

And Rioux’s landcuts are, of course, at once manipula-ble, variable, dispersed, excessive and hybrid. This lends them an unusually supple cast and an etiology traceable not only into his imagination and in the very machines he employs to manipulate them, but perhaps more im-portantly, in the wider telematic universe we inhabit to-day. He experiments with maquettes to determine and calibrate the final result. He favors the panorama (at up to 20 feet in length) as signature format and prints in his own studio. The resultant pa limpsests are based upon a systemic deconstruction of landscape and are modular in the sense in which Lev Manovich argued for digital ob-jects - meaning they are made up of objects put together to form larger objects, with each piece maintaining its independence. This modularity speaks to their infinite-loop-like isness. Therefore, they can be dismantled and reconstituted in myriad different, if relatable, forms. He calls this the “fractal structure of new media” (11). And perceiving a given landcut (City, Downtown, Suburb) means appreciating microstructures that do seem fractal in the way that Mandelbrot specified. This modularity leads to variability in that “a new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions” (12).

paul-Émile Rioux

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One might suggest that our increasingly interactive relationship with media through the computer primes us for an ever-deeper and richer appreciation of Rioux’s work: Goo gle, Wiki, FB windows open all at once on the desktop or laptop and accessible in a nanosecond. His images hearken back to the vast floating hoardings in Scott’s prescient film Bladerunner, a congested urban future (2019) which most inner cities have now caught up with (given the ubiquity of digital signs and rife with moving image advertisements) and an imminent fu-ture in which the immersive media environment will be simply everything.

Rioux’s surfaces beguile and fascinate even as they dis-turb and interrogate. As Jacques Rancière points out,

“the surface has not been a boundary, isolating the purity of an art, but, rather, a place of slippage between vari-ous spaces.” [13] Rioux reiterates the slippages even as he propagates topographies that haunt with a sense of their own boundlessness and immanence. By dividing his spaces into immense city-like grids that bend and shimmer, and endlessly morph, he invokes ambiguity and the resilient opacity of the surfaces that surround us. Speaking of opacity, it is telling that beneath any one surface there lies yet another, like the multiple skins of an onion, leading ineluctably inwards to a still-unseen generative core.

If we were to think of the landcut as a dystopian environ-ment, we could cite the thought of Paul Virilio - cultural critic, architect, urban planner and former director of the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris - whose City of Panic argues that cities everywhere have been subjected to political and technological terror throughout the last century. [14] Virilio speaks eloquently of the construction of identikit places, the proliferation of gated-communi-ties, the ever-widening net of surveillance, the cataclysm of the now. As we examine Rioux’s works, we segue with Virilio’s belief that states will have to defend them-selves not against external threat, but within their own dense and multi-layered metropolises (“the metropoli-tics of globalisation will take over the geopolitics of na-tions”). [15] Indeed, Rioux roves from image to image like a wily narrator of our super-accelerated present tense and, in his images, offers a profound climax. Virilio dilates upon “the pathological regression of the City, in which the cosmopolis, the open city of the past, gives way to this claustropolis”. [16] But are Rioux’s cities really human ‘claustropolises’ – or are they a dark vision of the environing machine world after Skynet has achieved consciousness and dominance?

Rioux seems to practice a form of what Ron Hutt has called ‘Digimorphism’: an aesthetic axiom of intercon-nectivity and transformation through both digital image making and contemporary painting [here photographic and postphotographic] methods and styles. He says it is It “an endless loop of sorting, selecting, transforming, and recombining images, marks, colors, forms and texts as they move between digital virtual space and material physical space.” [17].

Notably, Rioux disdains Photoshop, perhaps because he finds it archaic and unwieldy. He integrates myriad pho-tographs, topographies, drawing and 3D software rou-tines and uses them like so many paintbrushes to build palimpsests that interrogate and inform, and endlessly seduce and delight the eye.

Hutt further states:

“Digimorphism, then, is a manifestation of a future that is already here, but is accelerating at such a rapid speed of innovation that it cannot be contained long enough to become a new present. By linking these speeding, multi-plying technologies and cultural forces to a vast and rich tradition of art and creativity, digimorphic artists have the ability to intervene and function as humanizers of these new and potent visual forms. Designed to combine the new forms and transformational methods of the digital arts with the expressive power and rich aesthetic tradition of painting to create new progressive meaning systems and styles for them both. “ [18]

At the heart of our existential void, Rioux builds stellar digimorphic stuctures that question salient issues of being and dwelling, becoming and inhabitation. He suc-cessfully invests his landcuts with myriad dovetailed nod-al points, meaning and aura. His semiotic palimpsests may belong to tomorrow – but they are being built in his studio today. This is the moment of his hegemony.

James D. Campbell, Montréal, 2012

James D. Campbell is a writer on art and a curator based in Montreal. He is the author of well over 100 catalogues and books on art and artists. Recent and upcoming publications include monographs on pain-ters Martin Golland, Paul Bureau, Michel Daigneault and photographers Jasmine Bakalarz, Matthieu Brouillard and Marisa Portolese. Camp-bell also contributes frequently to many art maga-zines, including Frieze, Border Crossings, Canadian Art and others.

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Endnotes

1. James Thrall Soby, writing on this work in Yves Tanguy, (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1955), said: “What a cosmic image he achieved! The picture is sort of a boneyard of the world, its inexplica-ble objects gathered in fantastic profusion before a soft and brooding sky. The close gradations of light, tone and form are handled with such acumen that a pristine order evolves, whose poetic impact is more than likely to establish the picture as one of the masterworks in the art of our time.” He could have been describing Rioux’s Landcuts.2. Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 225.3. Ibid.4. Taylor, op. cit.5. Taylor.6. Taylor, p. 3207. Taylor, p. 3208. Ibid, p. 2319 Paul-Emile Rioux, “Statement”, n.p. n.d)10. Kristen Daly, “The Dissipating Aura of Cinema” in Transformations, Issue No. 15 November 2007 — “Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture”11. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), cited in Daly, p. 3012. Ibid, p. 3613. See Jacques Ranciere in Art of the possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in conversation with Jacques Ranciere in Artforum, March 2007.14. See Paul Virilio. City of Panic translated by Julie Rose (London, Berg Publishers, 2007)15. Ibid.16. Ibid.17. Ron Hutt, Digimorphism (see online text http://www.ronhutt.org)18. Ibid.

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Paul Emile Rioux lives in Montreal, Canada.www.landcuts.com

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Landcuts