A digital arts pioneer, Paul-Émile Rioux creates vast panoramas and urban landscapes that encompass disruptive idioms of endless territories. Composed entirely from numerical matrixes, the images illustrate dystopian observations and summon the aberrations associated with densely occupied urban spaces. He uses photographic language to convey, a conflict between his mathematical constructed landscapes and the perceived images of our own urban reality.

My work is a critical view of the rapid territorial and urban mutations and its ecological, social and human corollaries. I’m interested in the physical transformations within the city space and this notion of territories that are redefined by a mobile communications network, which today spurs the rhythmic social relationships that are oblivious to physical environment.

Paul-Emile Rioux lives in Montréal, Canada and for the past 20 years, he has been working with digital media. As a photographer he became fascinated with contemporary urban environments by exposing the city as a set of perceptions and power conflicts.

Over the course of his professional career, he acquired several prizes and distinctions in his field most notably, the Grand LUX Award (Canada & Quebec) for digital created work in 2000 & 2001. His artwork was amongst the finalists selected for the Lumen Prize Award in 2013 and was part of the traveling Lumen Prize’s 2013 International Exhibition. He studied communications at the University of Quebec and at HEC Montreal.

He obtained a diploma in cinema at Concordia University and completed a photography program at the International Center of Photography of New York. In his exploration-invention, Paul-Émile Rioux works on a number of levels; using photography, computer programs, 3-D models to mix and match science and fiction, reality and invention to take the viewer to places that could exits in a real world as well as in a virtual one. Various corporations and collectors have acquired his artworks across the world.