RIOUX

TURQUOISE

Water as a source of forgetting

Turquoise Default is a new series by Paul-Emile Rioux. It is in a preliminary stage, part of a practice which is unfolding in both the sense of experimentation as well as a planned unveiling of stages – transformation. This series comprises both video and still images. Regardless of format, each work is made up of three layers. Each layer is distinct and yet interrelated. This is perhaps most evident in the videos. The top layers, representing something like sky, move slowly; the mid layers, representing something like ocean, move rapidly; the bottom layers, representing something like a submerged world, transform, hidden from view below a fluid surface. Turquoise default plays on elemental notions. Water as a source of forgetting, erasing: it dissolves traces, it erodes, it serves as a dumping ground. Whatever is thrown in sinks below the surface, out of memory, our fears allayed by its pristine surface, which provides us with a sense of permanence and stability precisely because of its fluid properties – by its seeming ability to fill every hole. Of course water can only hide so much. Transformations take place in its depths, the ocean can absorb only so much waste before it all comes back, giving us a world irredeemably altered. The other element abundant in this series is light. Light is the contemporary element, not of course included in the original four: earth, air, fire, water. It is indispensable, however to our spectacle society. It’s foundation even. Because everything is light we believe we can see farther, but the down side is a world one cannot touch, which annihilates substance, or at least hides it away until it finally rushes back to take its revenge. Each image in Turquoise Default includes two horizons and both glow with some strange illumination just beyond reach. They seem at first to offer a promise or a hope – a sparkling promise of the future. At the same time it is something disquieting: unknown and unnatural, a promise to be fulfilled, something powerful and growing, belonging as much to the past as to the future. Debt is the economic structure of the non-world, that is the supermodern world composed of seemingly cyclical non-events taking place in an ever multiplying environment of non-places. The government of the non-world is the unipolar superpower – the victory without competitors. The choices are pre-determined, the future a seeming fait accompli, time as a series of spaces simply there to pass through. Debt as the replacement for prosperity, debt as service to this ideal, debt to the environment as it is slowly dismantled and never put back. Turquoise Default presents and investigates this image of a world – nominally positive and optimistic, yet upon closer inspect strangely formless, foreign and isolating. It poses the question: what is that strange glow just over the horizon? It doesn’t answer this for us, but all the same leaves us with the impression that despite the upbeat chatter things will not go exactly as promised and there may be consequences to pay. Neal Rockwell