Paul-Émile Rioux

Born 1956. Montreal, Canada

Paul-Émile Rioux is an artist working in digital media. He lives and works in Montreal, Canada. He studied animation at Concordia University, and worked professionally as a commercial photographer. He began exploring digital art forms in the 1990s.

In his work he creates and documents digital environments. Rioux plays with notions of reality, simulation, memory, and how the human mind constructs meaning and recognizes patterns from often chaotic or abstract signals. His digital work, situated in a post-photographic framework, challenges the notion of photography as a direct record of reality and truth.

He experiments with computer programs, manipulating them in ways their creators did not intend. The unexpected results create synthetic, otherworldly, yet uncanny landscapes, which he then explores as if he were a kind of virtual photographer documenting these spaces.

These panoramas do not correspond to a vision, he states: “they are space-time cuts from digital matter transformed by algorithms. I don’t draw these places: I implement possibilities.”